Toronto Star

This column was originally published in the Toronto Star on May 10, 2013.

Kansas City Star

The usually negative hive mind of the Internet has been bashing print media as hopelessly backward for so long now that the snark has become passé. But readers often remind me that some information will forever be better in print.

When you want to find something on a computer or mobile device, you generally use some kind of search functionality to navigate to what you want. Why pore over voluminous lists when you can easily filter out every extraneous datum to isolate exactly what you’re looking for?

That explains why many print sources have drastically cut down many tables and lists over the past decade. Like The Kansas City Star, almost all regional newspapers used to devote many pages a week to column after column of stock quotes and other information from the markets of the day before.

But since those closing prices were by definition already yesterday’s news once they appeared in the morning paper, I have actually heard relatively little complaint from readers as they’ve dwindled.

Virtually all serious investors track their portfolios electronically these days, and that’s one area where immediate digital delivery is a slam dunk over print. I can recall only a tiny number of readers saying they perused the print tables for prices of stocks they don’t own.

But search doesn’t always win out over printed lists. A key example is the “Weather Watch” on the back of the Sports Daily. It’s an integral part to many people’s day, and I get an earful any time there’s something amiss with it.

That was the case for several days earlier this month. The Star’s newsroom has recently switched to a new computer system that required rebuilding the templates that page designers use in their daily production. The invisible box that contains the “Weather Watch” was misaligned slightly, cutting off several cities in the temperatures list at the bottom.

Many callers told me they enjoy those lists not only to track what’s going on where their loved ones live but also because it’s sometimes simply fun to see that information in such an easy-to-use format. Here is an instance where, yes, you could go to your favorite weather app or website and plug in a big list of ZIP codes to see what’s going on. But the printed list is infinitely faster and more pleasant to use.

Readers also made their objections clear when the FYI section of Friday, April 19 omitted the “Now Showing” grid. That table lists current movies and various details such as their ratings, plots and where screenings can be found. It’s a page that is important to many.

My callers have long bemoaned the decline of print ads with movie starting times. The fact that fewer theaters now run those ads makes “Now Showing” even more important.

One person called the page one of the most useful things she finds in the paper. She told me she and her husband pull it out, fold it up and take it with them when they go out on the town. “We don’t always decide what movie to see before dinner,” she said.

“Because I didn’t have that page with me this week, my only other option was to use my smartphone to try to find out what’s playing. Have you ever done that? You have to put in your location and wait while it pulls up what’s around you. It takes so much more time than that nice, concise page. Please tell me (editors) aren’t getting rid of it.”

It hasn’t been cut, and the scores of calls and emails I received tell me that’s the right decision.

This column was originally published in the Kansas City Star on April 28, 2013.

The Observer

Take a look at the For the Record column. It’s been appearing in the same place for 12 years now: all our dirty washing in one basket.

Our latest readership survey shows that 83% of readers said they were aware of it and read it. That’s a very high percentage and shows how engaged our readers are with the Observer.

We are unique in the Sunday market in having a regular corrections column. We think it is important to be straight with you and admit when we have made errors. We like to think it helps account for the same survey showing that 92% of our readers trust our journalism.

Now let’s imagine for a moment that this week’s four corrections had been published after investigation by a new regulatory body set up in the wake of the Leveson report. Of course it’s highly unlikely such matters would ever get as far as a regulator but let’s pretend for a moment that they had.

Nobody knows yet what that new body will look like but campaigners and politicians alike want it to have powers to direct the wording and placement of corrections in newspapers.

There is a desire to see corrections on the page where the offending article first appeared – at the scene of the crime, as it were.

So the first item, concerning the playwright David Greig and his new play, The Events, would appear this week on page 5; the second, on population figures, in Sport on page 2; the third in Comment on page 45.

Yet all newspapers go up and down in size according to advertising demand. The news section of the Observer this week is 56 pages; last week it was 58 pages but it can go as low as 48, when page 45 would be in Business, not Comment, and page 5 might be a full-page advertisement.

And the paper changes its content several times during the course of Saturday evening to take account of developing news and regional sport: there are five main editions and Scottish and Irish editions. Stories move around the paper as the evening progresses: some disappear altogether.

Last week’s first edition front-page splash on a bishop’s attack on the political manipulation of immigration figures fell out of the paper entirely for one edition and reappeared on page 4 for the last two editions. If it had contained an inaccuracy, where would a correction appear?

The temperature error corrected above ran on page 2 for the first two editions and was spotted and changed for the third edition (after the whole spread had moved back four pages to make room for the breaking story of the death of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky). Would we run it on page 2 for two editions only and then drop it?

Campaigners talk about corrections having “equal prominence” to the original offending article but often the point at issue is in, for example, paragraph 12 of a page lead and requires only a simple statement to set the record straight. Is the page to be led by a single paragraph?

And how would this work online? Once you’ve opened a story, everything has “equal prominence”. Corrections currently appear on a separate page on our website, and in addition, we will correct an error in the text of the offending story and append a footnote, explaining what has been changed. That’s a transparent way to proceed.

A reader wrote last week urging us to consider our duty to “match the repair to the injury” and adding: “Most of us have ‘always-read’ columnists and news-topic interests. If any favourite gets something wrong, aren’t the same reader groups likely to read corrections where they read the mistake in the first place – rather than consult a corrections box elsewhere?”

Well, 83% of readers appear to disagree. They can see the value in putting all our mea culpas in one place rather than scattering them all over the paper likes bits of confetti.

And a final thought, though it might be a hostage to fortune: in the 12 years we have been running corrections, the Observer has had no adjudications against it from the current regulator, the Press Complaints Commission, so we must be doing something right.

This column was originally published in The Observer on March 30, 2013.