Everyone makes mistakes. But what happens when the mistake is corrected? It's a question that is especially relevant online.
A reader draws our attention this week to a recent editorial in the Journal Sentinel on the state's Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund that includes an erroneous number. The newspaper later ran a correction, but the error remained in the body of the online editorial, unchanged - even though it was a central point of the editorial's argument and was off by $700 million.
Or take Sunday's counterintuitive headline, "As crime rate drops, calls for police soar." After the Milwaukee Police Department released new corrected data Monday, the paper posted online what in the business is called a "skin-back" - more than just a correction, a whole news story built around correcting a previous story. Meanwhile, the original headline - now established as erroneous - remains.
Arguably, neither of the original errors is strictly the fault of the newspaper, though in the case of the editorial about the Patients' Compensation Fund, it would have been wise, in retrospect, to make a routine call to update the fund-balance number. Still, the errors persist online in the original instances (at least, as of July 27). If either item turns up, say, in a routine online search, the reader has no way of knowing they contain mistakes.
In another recent instance, the original print story on a court case misstated the year in which certain alleged crimes took place. A correction set the record straight, and the original story online was discreetly
corrected.By contrast, consider the practice at The New York Times. First of all, corrections are collected in one clearly labeled place - and a reader can see what they pertain to from the directory. At the JS, there's a link to "corrections" on the home menu bar, but when you follow it, it simply defaults to the most recent item in a list. Gaze down at the rest of the items on that list, and you don't know what they pertain to until you open each individual link.
Second, each Times correction links back to the original article it corrects. Third, if you follow the link back, as with the correction to this article, you'll see the correction prominently advertised at the bottom of the story. The JS offers neither of those features.
(Not to toot our own horn, but in case you're wondering, here's what Milwaukee Magazine does online: Minor errors of, say, grammar or spelling, are silently corrected. Errors of fact are corrected in the online version, with a note at the end of the item acknowledging the corrected error.)
This isn't about mistakes. In more than 30 years in this business, I've made my share of them.
But in the new pro-am media world, the credibility of professional journalism has never been more important. And one of the simplest ways to help maintain it would be to fix errors clearly, prominently, and most of all, with transparency.
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Comment below, or write Pressroom at pressroom@milwaukeemagazine.com.
4 Comments
Hear! Hear!
thank you thank you thank you
Judith Ann
Absolutely. Some place in a corrected article, it should say "update" or "correction:" or even "this article was corrected (date, time) to reflect new (or correct invalid) information."
I like the Times method, which says it right out in the on-line piece. Adds credibility, in my opinion. And even 'regular' newspapers can't buy credibility. They have to earn and maintain it, just like the rest of us.
Please forward this to Andrew Breitbart.