Newspaper people try to get everything right, but given that they are human beings writing and editing huge amounts of copy on unforgiving deadlines, often they don’t.
Thus, they write and publish corrections. And that’s a good thing. Printed corrections to material that has been published in the print edition of The Times appear most commonly on Page A2. Online corrections appear on the articles themselves.
The Times takes this seriously enough that it has a senior editor and a news assistant who deal exclusively with corrections. And, as with many things at The Times, there are rather formalized rules about them.
So, when The Washington Post (which has a new editor, Martin Baron) this week unveiled some revisions to its online corrections policy, I thought it might interest readers to see how they compare with those at The Times.
Here are The Post’s new rules, with some reponses from Greg Brock, senior editor for standards at The Times. The memo appeared Wednesday on Jim Romenesko’s blog, JimRomenesko.com, and The Post’s new rules were summarized as follows:
“We should never ‘unpublish’ stories from the Web.â€
“Placement for corrections reflects gravity of error. A serious error must be noted at the top of the story, blog or graphic.â€
“Clarifications should be rare and must be approved by the editor-in-chief, or managing editors.â€
And here are Mr. Brock’s responses to each:
1. On “unpublishing,†meaning removing a story entirely from the Web:
Yes. We have a strict policy on unpublishing: We don’t. If a special case arises, then Phil Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards (and my boss), would make the final decision to remove the information. It’s not something we do lightly. An example: Say we po! sted a picture with an article and discovered that not only was the person in the picture not in the article, but the picture itself had nothing to do with the point of the article. We would remove such a picture - and have done so. When we do, we add a note explaining why we removed the picture. An example: If we posted a picture of Margaret Sullivan, noting that she is on the Top 10 Most Wanted List, and she isn’t, we would remove that and explain that the picture has vanished and why. (That she is really No. 15.)
If an issue of libel were to arise, the odds are that we would remove the information - but publish a note explaining why it was removed. We have had postings before that were just flat-out wrong. A “source†told us something and it turned out not to be right. We do not take that down. We put a paragraph labeled UPDATE at the top of the post, saying that the report below is erroneous. Even though the post is wrong, we still do not believe that we should unpublish it and pretend it neer existed. If we removed the article, then the UPDATE would make no sense because the reader wouldn’t have the benefit of reading the original (however wrong).
2. On the placement of corrections:
If we run an Editors’ Note â€" which may indicate a violation of ethical standards or other serious lapse â€" we put that note at the top: Editors’ Note Appended.
If it is a correction of fact, we do not put Correction Appended at the top anymore. We used to do that, but that was because in those days we did not correct the error in the article. So the Corrections Appended label at the top warned readers that they were about to read an article that had an error in it. And then they learned at the bottom of the article what that error was. Yes, yes: a very bad system for the Web. So we changed it. Now we correct the error in the article, so we feel that there is no reason to warn readers. But we must, without exception, acknowledge and explain at the bottom that “an! earlier ! version of this article†… screwed up whatever. (Let us count the ways.)
Even that rule is not set in stone. If we had an egregious error of fact in an article, we might choose to put the label Correction Appended at the top just to make sure readers went to the end and read the correction: “Greg Brock retired from The Times; he was not fired.†Any person so maligned would want The Times to point every reader to that correction - in huge type.
3. On “clarificationsâ€:
We don’t run “clarifications†or use such a label. We label them Corrections and then offer specific info: The article was wrong; it referred incompletely to something (but it was not wrong); it referred imprecisely to something (but it was not wrong). And on rare occasions, we use: “may have left the incorrect impression…â€
On a related note: The Times is also working on an online corrections form and expects to have a rudimentary version of it available soon. A more sophisticatedand complete effort is in the works, too. I hope that these forms will be available to readers as soon as possible. The Times does a good job of correcting errors, but streamlining the process would be helpful internally and a service to Times readers.
And from Craig Silverman at Poynter.org, here’s some commentary on the Post’s corrections policies.
