If traditional journalism represents the first draft of history, then online news is sometimes more like a reporters notebook. By that I mean online news, with its pressure to publish and update on Internet time, can be less polished and more prone to errors than a newspaper or magazine with, by comparison, their relatively leisurely deadlines.
I’ve been spending about an hour a day during my short tenure as MSNBC.com ombudsman (a month so far) reading e-mail to the editors, and based on that admittedly unscientific sampling, this is one of readers pet peeves. Its also an issue that exists across the online news world, as evidenced by a column in the latest issue of American Journalism Review urging Web sites to think about how they fix their mistakes. As it turns out, MSNBC.com measures up quite well against the suggestions in that AJR column. In fact, my main criticism after reviewing this sites related policies and practices is that I believe it should institute a procedure that the AJR writer dismisses as impractical in this medium a corrections page.
All kinds of errors
Serious errors merit full-blown corrections which, according to MSNBC.com policy, means setting the record straight and doing so with equal or greater prominence than the original mistake.
To make the point, first consider the fact that errors come in a variety of shapes, sizes and levels of significance.
As elsewhere on the Internet, most of the errors on MSNBC.com are relatively minor misspellings, grammatical mistakes, fractured syntax, sentence fragments, repeated paragraphs, or a mangled headline. But even if minor, they are clearly annoying and damaging to MSNBC.coms reputation. I love the site, said reader Brian Compton in an e-mail the other day, but these mistakes are intolerable. They call into question the reliability of all the news presented here. If obvious copy writing mistakes arent corrected, I must wonder if facts are checked and sources verified.
Given the volume of content on the site, as well as the speed with which much of it must be processed, you could argue that the only surprise here is that there arent more errors. But its also true that the safety net to catch and fix such errors is less robust at MSNBC.com (and I would guess at other news sites as well) than in the print world. At the Los Angeles Times, for example, where I worked for 27 years, an article typically passed through at least four editors before appearing on a subscribers doorstep the section editor or an assistant, two different copy editors, and a proofreader. Stories for the front page were screened by even more editors.
An evolving medium
This, of course, is a new and evolving medium, somewhere between print and live broadcast. Models from other media may not work. At one time, for example, MSNBC.com also had a separate copy desk, experienced in catching just the kind of minor errors that so annoy readers. However, requiring that all articles be funneled through this one group turned into a bottleneck, recalls senior news producer Reed Price. The copy desk was disbanded and editors for each section of the site were made responsible for devising their own systems of back-reading articles. Now, while MSNBC.com strives to have at least two different sets of editorial eyes on every news story before publication, even that doesnt always happen. The news section, for example, has only one editor working nights.
True, many articles on the site are from content partners of MSNBC.com that have their own copy-editing functions. Articles from the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post and Newsweek, for example, have presumably been well-edited before they arrive. But many articles on the site are either proprietary or assembled under deadline pressure by MSNBC.com editors using information from multiple wire services and other content partners. This is where most of the problems occur.
Current practice
What happens when errors are discovered often thanks to sharp-eyed readers? Most are simply corrected without any specific acknowledgment. A fast-developing news story such as the downed American reconnaissance plane in China or the postponed execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh may be updated a half-dozen times or more in a 24-hour period. These are, in effect, stories in progress, and text repairs from the last version, if needed, are usually made at the same time as updates.
More serious errors are the subject of a formal MSNBC.com corrections policy that has twice been on display in recent days. One instance involved an editing error in which an individual was incorrectly characterized as Elton Johns former lover. The other involved a photograph accompanying an article about a study suggesting that mineral water is no safer or healthier than tap water. Instead of a generic water photo, the shot used was of a supermarket display clearly showing various bottled water brands even though no specific brands were mentioned in the article
Correcting errors
There had been complaints in both cases from an attorney for the individual mis-characterized in the Elton John story and from an advertiser in the bottled water incident. MSNBC.com editors determined both cases were serious enough to merit full-blown corrections which, according to policy, means setting the record straight and doing so with equal or greater prominence compared with the original mistake.
In the case of the erroneous bottled water photo, that meant replacing the photo on the article with a correction message and also including a correction notice on the home page of the site, for one day, which is the same length of time the original photo was displayed on the site.
The correction on the Elton John story was posted May 5 in the Living section, where the original article appeared, and, according to policy, will remain there through May 20 because the erroneous reference appeared on the site for 15 days.
MSNBC.com editor-in-chief Merrill Brown says that in deciding whether an error is substantial enough to merit a correction, we use editorial judgment about the scale and importance of the item in question. If the error is on the scale of a date or ball score, were unlikely to publish a correction
A recommendation
One result, in my mind, is a gray area a third category of error that, while admittedly difficult to define, may be the most troublesome of all. These are in-between errors more than typos or misspellings, but less egregious than the mistakes that typically get full-blown corrections. An article on the anniversary of the Columbine school shootings, for example, included for a time the wrong name for one of the perpetrators. A headline over an article on a monthly government jobs and payroll report on first publication misrepresented the severity of job losses reported in the article itself. Both stories were eventually fixed though not otherwise acknowledged. But what of the readers who saw the flawed versions? Theyre unlikely to click on a link to the same story a second time in order to see the corrected version, and therefore may remain misinformed.
Major newspapers like the New York Times run corrections like these each day in a standard spot Page 2 in the case of the Times. Brown says that while MSNBC.com editors have discussed publishing such a page, they have at least for now, decided against doing so for three reasons: It would be hard to draw attention to the page, we already provide a better platform for publishing corrections than this is likely to provide, and it would be labor-intensive to maintain.
Im not convinced. I think such a page would bring a healthy additional dose of accountability to MSNBC.com. A Corrections link perhaps on the home page along with other MSNBC Quick Links like Letters to the Editor and the Crossword would address the discoverability problem. This wouldnt be a page for acknowledging spelling and grammar errors. It also would not supplant the current practice of making major corrections in such a fashion as to give them equal prominence to the original story. But it would include an additional acknowledgment of the most serious mistakes and would provide a home for those troublesome in-betweens.
