Every publication gets things wrong. The interesting variable is not the error rate, which is broadly similar across serious outlets, but what happens in the twenty-four hours afterwards.
Most newsrooms treat the correction as an obligation to be discharged with minimum surface area. A line appended to the bottom of a piece few readers will revisit, worded to concede as little as possible, frequently in the passive voice. It satisfies the standards policy and it is close to useless.
The passive voice is the tell
There is a recognisable house style for the reluctant correction. An earlier version of this article stated. It has been updated to reflect. The error was regrettable. Nothing in that construction contains an actor, and readers notice, because the whole point of the paragraph is to establish that somebody is answerable.
The alternative costs nothing except discomfort. Say what was wrong, say what is correct, say how it happened if it is knowable, and put it where the people who read the error will encounter it. A correction that appears at the top of the piece rather than the foot is read; one at the foot is filed.
The mechanics matter more than they used to, because a story now exists in several places at once. The article is corrected and the newsletter that carried it is not. The social post stays up unamended. The syndicated copy on a partner site is untouched. A publication can correct the record on its own site and leave the error circulating everywhere it actually reached, which is the version of the correction that most readers never see.
Independent operators have an advantage here that they do not always use. A publication built on a direct relationship with its readers can simply write to the people who received the error, in the same channel, and say so — an option a wire-distributed piece does not have. Doing it well is one of the few things a small outlet can do better than a large one.
There is a structural reason the practice is weak, and it is not indifference. Corrections are usually owned by whoever wrote the piece, which places the least disinterested person in charge of describing their own mistake. Newsrooms that handle it well have moved that ownership — a standards editor, or simply a different desk — for the same reason a correction is reviewed by someone not involved in the original story wherever the policy is taken seriously.
The competitive point is worth stating plainly. In an environment where the press release quietly runs a great deal of the news, the visible willingness to correct is one of the few remaining signals distinguishing a publication from a distribution channel.
Topics mediajournalism
