Errors in Newtown Shootings Coverage Reflect Growing Pressures

Many Times readers wrote to me over the weekend with concerns about the coverage of the unfathomable events in Newtown, Conn. I'll do my best over the next few days to answer and shed some light on the major questions and complaints.

I expect to do this in pieces. This initial blog post will be a start, but not the last word on the subject.

I'll also state, from the start, that as the former managing editor and chief editor of a metropolitan newspaper, as well as a former beat reporter, I know too well that some mistakes may be inevitable on a major, fast-moving story, working against brutally demanding deadlines. That's not an excuse, just a reality. Other mistakes are avoidable â€" sometimes that means being slower on the draw, which runs counter to every competitive news gatherer's DNA.

Topic No. 1: Speed vs. Acc uracy In the Hypercompetitive Social Media Age

On Friday morning, as the story broke, the Web was filled with erroneous reports â€" not only from regular people on Twitter, but also from major news organizations. The worst of those may have been the false identification of a young man named Ryan Lanza as the gunman, including the circulation of his Facebook photo and some of his posts from Facebook. As we now know, the shooter, Adam Lanza, was the brother of Ryan Lanza. Thus, there was layer upon layer of extraordinarily damaging false information.

To the best of my knowledge, The Times had no part in circulating the Facebook information. But on Friday afternoon, on the Web, The Times did name Ryan Lanza as the shoo ter, attributing that to other news organizations.

Then, in Saturday's print edition, this sentence appeared in the fourth paragraph of the lead front-page article: “The principal had buzzed Mr. Lanza in because she recognized him as the son of a colleague.” The attribution was in the previous paragraph â€" to an unnamed law enforcement official.

As of Monday morning, The Times had appended two corrections to the article.

* An earlier version of this article suggested that the gunman in the Connecticut shooting used a rifle to carry out the shootings inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In fact, according to law enforcement, the guns used in the school shooting were both handguns.

* An earlier version of this article, based on news reports at the time, indicated that Nancy Lanza had worked at Sandy Hook Elementary S chool in Newtown, Conn., where Friday's shooting occurred. On Saturday, the school superintendent said that there was no evidence Ms. Lanza had ever worked at the school.

I spoke with Greg Brock, senior editor for standards, who handles Times corrections. As of about noon, he was in the process of writing a new correction about the “buzzed in” error, and reversing the correction about the use of the rifle.

“In the Twitter age, the pressure is worse than ever to be fast - it's become more difficult,” he said. “Some of the pressure is coming from readers. If they see a headline on a Web site, they start looking for a complete and fully reported story from us, and they protest if they don't find it.”

“We try our best to fix and acknowledge errors, as soon as possible,” Mr. Brock said. He gave the following examples of online corrections to articles that appeared on the Web in real time:

A Painful Duty: Consoling a Town Preparing to Bury Its Children

In Town at Ease With Its Firearms, Tightening Gun Rules Was Resisted

Children Were All Shot Multiple Times With a Semiautomatic, Officials Say

Rifle Used in Killings, America's Most Popular, Highlights Regulation Debate

‘These Tragedies Must End,' Obama Says

The Shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School

Times readers also pointed out that in an article on media coverage on the events in Monday's print edition, this sentence appears, in the context of network news reports: “On Friday, there was a succession of reports about the shooting and the gunman that turned out to be wrong: reports about the gunman's name, about his occupation, about how he got into the building.” The article does not say, but should have, that it was not just the TV networks, but also The Times itself that participated in at least some of those errors.

Easy to say, and increasingly hard to do, is to follow this well-accepted advice: It's always better to be slower and right than faster and wrong.

I asked Jill Abramson, the executive editor, a bout The Times's coverage, the errors that were made and her overall directives on speed and accuracy:

She responded:

I am proud of every aspect of our coverage and beyond thankful to the people who reported and edited this horrific story. Our approach is always accuracy over speed. For example, on Saturday, we obtained the first photo of Lanza. We had one source with a “photographic memory” who was certain the picture was him, but we did not publish the photo until we had a second former classmate also identify him.

There were many times on Friday and Saturday, she said, when top editors stopped to ask “How do we know this?” We hit the brakes until we were sure of our sourcing.

Ms. Abramson acknowledged that The Times did report some erroneous information, adding, “The best practice is then to correct things as they are proven wrong, which is another guiding approach.”

Other issues that have surfaced and t hat I expect to explore soon (and there may be others):

- The mention of the Adam Lanza's possible Asperger's or autism disorders, and whether that was relevant or misleading.

- The use of various photographs and headline words, which some readers found objectionable for a variety of reasons.

Again, more to come.