As of this writing, the online version of the article remains uncorrected.
Parting Shot
“The Nov. 29 obituary of Robert M. White II mistakenly referred to him as “Mr. Smith” on two occasions.” – Washington Post
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Regret the Error — December 5, 2008 11:58 AM
Scrubbing Away Their Sins
You can’t disappear your errors online
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Craig, thanks for adding your voice to this issue. One important aspect of making online corrections is that they should appear at the original URL of the original story -- because bloggers, other news orgs, etc. may well be linking to the original report. That way, news of the correction is more likely to spread. That approach is also most helpful to search engines indexing the content -- and thus helps people searching for information.
- Amy Gahran
Posted by Amy Gahran on Fri 5 Dec 2008 at 01:12 PM
So, re error correction, there's scrubbing, deleting, rowback, entombment(?) (burying the error notice where readers won't see it), opacity(?) (not clearly informing the reader of both what was said and what's correct)
We need a wiki of Journalism Antipatterns. Perhaps on Journawiki?
CJR could do a post soliciting pet peeves, to collect raw material.
Posted by Anna Haynes on Sat 6 Dec 2008 at 02:57 PM
A good suggestion, Anna. I'd also love to see a wiki where journalists could share tips for preventing errors.
Posted by Craig Silverman on Fri 12 Dec 2008 at 04:09 PM