Regret the Error
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March 15, 2010 01:14 PM
Bad News
Howard Rheingold sees a critical need for critical thinking
They went looking for crap, and by golly they found plenty of it.
Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism.
The students, along with other NewsTrust users, spent...
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March 05, 2010 10:50 AM
Meet Retracto
Introducing Andrew Breitbart’s “correction alpaca”
Andrew Breitbart is well on his way to building an online media empire to call his own. I’d call him the right’s version of Arianna Huffington, but I’m worried that might make him send his alpaca after me.
Let me explain.
In late January, after James O’Keefe was arrested for allegedly tampering with Senator Mary Landrieu’s office phones, Breitbart’s new...
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February 26, 2010 10:09 AM
The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook
Tips for writers and editors on how to avoid or detect journalistic plagiarism
Last week, I examined why news organizations aren’t using plagiarism detection services to root out literary thieves. Technology has a role in helping prevent and detect plagiarism, but it’s by no means a panacea. Good habits and best practices can help avoid and detect plagiarism (and fabrication).
The challenge is that, to my knowledge, no one has written a...
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February 19, 2010 12:13 PM
To Catch A Plagiarist
There are tools to catch plagiarists in action. Why don’t news outlets use them?
As the general manager of the iThenticate plagiarism detection service, Robert Creutz has unique insight into the recent Gerald Posner plagiarism flap at The Daily Beast.
Posner’s theft was first identified by Slate’s Jack Shafer, which caused Beast editors to begin looking into Posner’s previous work. (Meanwhile, Shafer published another column that revealed additional examples of...
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February 05, 2010 11:59 AM
Dumb Blonde Story
Sunday Times botches the science in piece on the “princess effect”
Dr. Aaron Sell, a researcher at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, has been hearing from a lot of old friends and colleagues over the past couple of weeks—and he’s not happy about it.
The calls and e-mails are flowing in thanks to a January 17 article published in London’s Sunday Times that prominently featured...
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January 29, 2010 11:18 AM
Endangered Species
News librarians are a dying breed
When it comes to the layoffs and buyouts that have hit newspapers over the last couple of years, copy editors seem to be the most at risk of losing their jobs. So it wasn’t too much of a shock when Leslie Norman’s husband was laid off from his copy editing position at The Wall Street Journal.
But then last...
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January 22, 2010 12:26 PM
Error Prevention Made Easy
Three new applications every journalist should know about
I was reading about political iPhone apps on MediaStyle.ca, a blog maintained by Canadian communications consultant Ian Capstick, when I noticed a strange little badge at the bottom of his post:
I clicked on it and a pop-up window invited me to “Correct grammar, spelling and other errors.” After highlighting text within the post,...
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January 15, 2010 11:19 AM
Standard of Living
Guillaume Chenevière wants to standardize our approach to quality control
The news executive patiently listened to Guillaume Chenevière’s points, and then explained that, the way he saw it, he had alligators crawling all over his back, and Chenevière was lecturing him about the need to drain the swamp where the gators live.
Such is the lonely, misunderstood life of the media quality standard man. Chenevière, a former print and...
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January 08, 2010 11:43 AM
Mission: Quality Control
If you’re going to upend the old editorial process, you need to create a new one
At this time last year, I made a few wishes for corrections and accuracy-related developments in 2009. For the most part, I’d say my wishes went unfulfilled, and one of them is more pressing than ever.
Overall, 2009 was notable for a few positive advancements in corrections-related technology. I highlighted several of these in my annual round-up of
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December 18, 2009 09:39 AM
Corrections for the True Connoisseur
Celebrating some of the year’s strangest corrections
Like a chef who becomes bored with steak and potatoes and begins seeking out the strange and sublime, my taste in media errors and corrections is beginning to veer towards the edges.
This became clear as I undertook my annual ritual of reviewing a year’s worth of media errors and corrections published on my Web site, in order...
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December 11, 2009 11:20 AM
Don’t Need to Wait, Get the Record Straight
WaPo’s Public Enemy correction brings the noise on Twitter
Call it the correction that launched a thousand tweets.
Over the years, many errors and corrections have spidered their way around the Internet--beef panties, anyone?--but never before has a newspaper error inspired its very own Twitter hashtag. In that respect, this Washington Post correction for a tone deaf error is one of the most notable corrections...
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December 04, 2009 11:12 AM
Archival Research
New study finds there’s no clear standard for updating or maintaining online news archives
Of all the requests she’s received to erase information contained in online articles, Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star, says one in particular stands out.
The reason? It came from a fellow journalist, on behalf of a friend who wanted some embarrassing and outdated information scrubbed from the Star’s Web site. English couldn’t believe a journalist...
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November 20, 2009 12:08 PM
Sorry, Wrong Number
It’s not OK for journalists to be bad at math
Every year, Scott Maier, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, asks his students to raise their hands if they went into journalism because they love writing. Unsurprisingly, most of them put their hands in the air.
“Then I ask how many of them got into journalism because they love math and numbers, and the hands...
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November 13, 2009 09:41 AM
A Microformat with Major Implications
A vision of automated correction notifications and more
Imagine this: you visit one of your favorite news sites and the homepage displays a notification that an article you read yesterday has been updated with new information, and a story you read last week has been corrected. The notification enables you to click on a link and read the correction, or to be taken to the updated story.
... Continue reading
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes (All-Lehman Edition): Round-Trip, Clueless, Felix on Fire
- Reuters Is Excellent in Digging Up a Health Insurer’s Tactics
The Observatory Science
- When the Well Runs Dry Is Duke Energy’s support for a new SciTech section a problem?
- Reviving Science Coverage in the Carolinas Weekly newspaper section, community-journalism project deliver fresh content
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Audit D.C. Notes: The Post on Chamber Politics, Roll Call on K St. Pay, Hoop Dreams
- Parsing the AP’s Health Care Primer Its attempt at informing falls short
