Corrections: Basic Journalistic Hygiene

One of the surest ways for a news organization to keep and gain credibility is to have an easy-to-use mechanism for reporting mistakes and a quick process for correcting them.

It's inevitable that even the best, most thorough news organizations will make mistakes. The question is how they handle them. [Most do so poorly.]

Today, as more people get much — if not most-- of their news online, there needs to be a common agreed-upon standard for reporting and correcting errors.

The Report an Error Alliance provides this icon free of charge to news and information websites. reportanerror.org hide caption

Two journalists who care very much about this issue launched an initiative last week to get news organizations – big and small – to come up with a standard on how to make it easier to report mistakes.

"We've seen the maturation of online journalism, but corrections and error reporting haven't advanced at the same rate," said Silverman, whose blog Regret the Error focuses on corrections. "In the online environment, mistakes move much farther and faster. It's extremely important we do our best to prevent and correct them. It's just basic journalistic hygiene."

The pair wants NPR and other news organizations to place a button at the top of each story page for reporting mistakes. A reader could report the error, and continue reading without having to hunt down how to make a correction.

MediaBugs is offering a free "Report an Error" widget.

"If someone is reading an article and they see a mistake, most aren't going to search for a way to report an error," said Silverman. "We are really losing a lot of corrections because news organizations make it so difficult to report a mistake."

Silverman and Rosenberg's idea differs from what NPR does.

Now if a reader spots a mistake in NPR's Web text, he or she can go to Contact Us, call, email corrections@npr.org or write a comment beneath the story and hope an NPR staffer spots it. Or use Social Media tools, such as Twitter, to alert NPR to a mistake.

The Report an Error idea shouldn't be a huge technological challenge for NPR, which already has buttons on its website for readers to print, e-mail or share a story.

The Toronto Star has had a "Report an Error" icon at the end of every article on its website for over three years. Here is an example.

"Allowing readers to 'Report an Error' makes every reader a fact checker," said Star Public Editor, Kathy English, who handles the reports. "It's a substantial amount of work but of course it's imperative that our digital content is accurate, given its enduring lifespan and easy accessibility through search engines."

I believe NPR should add a "Report an Error" button, which would in effect become a dedicated feedback channel.

NPR's managing editor for digital, Mark Stencel, isn't sure it's necessary.

"Based on the volume of messages we receive," said Stencel, "I don't think we've made it especially difficult for our listeners and readers to tell us when they think we've made an error. I appreciate the commitment to accountability [the icon] represents, but I'm not sure it solves a problem our users actually have."

What To Do About It

So let's say that NPR did add a Report an Error icon. The next step is a reliable mechanism for fixing errors. This is time-consuming, labor-intensive and would require more staff.

"The reporting is easy," said Silverman. "What is a problem is the work flow, who handles it and how the eventual correction is published. The reality is those elements are significant challenges."

When a request for correction comes to NPR, it goes to Stu Seidel, NPR's deputy managing editor. Some mistakes are obvious and corrected immediately. Most are sent to staff involved in the story to get their feedback.

It's easy to correct someone's age or a mistaken title, but trickier if it involves nuance or is debatable. For example, some requests for corrections really involve a matter of opinion rather than an established fact.

How Does NPR Acknowledge Mistakes Online?

In the last redesign, NPR smartly included a "corrections box" that automatically sits at the top of a Web story. When a correction is made online, it is automatically fed to NPR's correction site.

Todd Holzman handles NPR's Web text corrections. He says that online corrections are a "continuous process that is most robust when we are full staffed. But does not stop just because we have limited staff later at night, on the weekends, etc."

Factual errors such as the misspelled name of a non-public official would be fixed without a correction acknowledgment, said Holzman. [I think all corrections should be published.]

"Ultimately, there is a threshold for what is significant enough to merit a formal correction," said Holzman. "That threshold is subjective. However the goal of NPR.org is to be as transparent as possible as quickly as possible and to acknowledge that we do make mistakes. I have no patience for defensiveness or for covering our tracks."

It's become standard for blogs to use strike-through keys to show incorrect text and then fix it, according to Silverman. But that doesn't always work because a correction might involve more than a misspelled name and need further clarification.

Unaware there even was a blog standard, I recently wondered what to do when I wrote that public radio stations get about 10 percent of their money from the federal government. After I posted it, an NPR manager said it would be more accurate to say 3 to 30 percent of funding comes from the feds, depending on the station size.

I put an "UPDATE" next to the fact on my original column. What I should have done is corrected with a strike-through and put a CORRECTION at the top. One can never be too transparent about errors.

For too long, most news organizations, including NPR, resisted making corrections, apparently in the belief that acknowledging mistakes undermined their credibility. But the opposite is the case.

Corrections are critical to credibility. The more NPR corrects its mistakes the more credibility it will have with its audience. I know NPR, as a company, believes this, but it still needs to do better.

There's no doubt that making it easier to report errors will mean many more requests for corrections and dealing with them will be a hassle.

But to further demonstrate its commitment to journalistic accuracy, I believe NPR should join the Report an Error the Alliance and put that little button on every web page.

Here are the 71 members that already have joined.