Handling Errors Published Online
Posted on Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 8:34 PM
To correct or not to correct after an article has been posted online? We've covered this dilemma before, but it bears repeating now.
By Meredith L. Dias
What is the best course of action when you've printed a story online that contains grammatical, punctuation, attribution, or even factual errors? Which mistakes require further comment? What corrections policy will best serve your readers?
The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) code of ethics states that "journalists should ... admit mistakes and correct them promptly." Some editors interpret this literally, calling out fixes of even the most minor grammatical errors. Others ignore the SPJ tenet completely and scrub their stories of significant errors without comment (i.e., delete or edit content without issuing a correction or retraction). Still others differentiate between minor technical errors and more substantial errors that require correction notices. One of our readers once told us, "If it is a simple typo, we'll fix it without comment -- or delay.... If something was factually incorrect, including the spelling of someone's name, we will correct it in the current version, plus under the heading 'Correction.'"
How should editors of online publications differentiate between innocuous errors and ones that require further comment? Years ago the Hartford Courant published a story entitled "Putnam Police Training Could Be at Fault for Woodstock Fair Shooting." The story was published online at 10:12 p.m. on a Monday and attracted two comments in response to the following sentence: "Because the pullet [sic] was travelling [sic] such little velocity when it struck the man, it may have passed through a berm or other structure intended to stop the bullets, Vance said." In response, "Susan5868" asked, "Does anyone proof read this stuff before publication?" Another reader, "phucer," replied simply, "Ugh."
The next day the same article bore a new title: "Stray Bullet That Hit Man May Have Come from a Putnam Police Officer." In the revised article, the aforementioned sentence had undergone some cosmetic surgery: "Because the bullet was traveling at such a low velocity when it struck the man, it might have passed through a berm or other structure intended to stop the bullets, Vance said." All of these changes were implemented without notice to the reader; however, "phucer" provided a link to the original, unedited article in the revised article's responses.
What can we learn from this? Over the years, many of our readers have said that typographical or grammatical errors do not warrant a correction notice; however, the reader response to the Courant article provided an interesting counterpoint to this editorial consensus. Though publications generally agree that grammatical tweaks can be scrubbed from the record without further comment, readers may want transparency in even the simplest online edits.
When scrubbing grammatical or spelling errors from the record, editors ought to ask themselves: Will any readers be disadvantaged in the process? It's also important to remember that unacknowledged edits can introduce errors into the journalistic record. For instance, if a publication misspells Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe's name and edits without comment, this will do little to alter the historical record -- in context, even with the misspelling, the subject of the article will be clear. However, if a publication misspells an unknown person's name and later scrubs the mistake, this could alter the record if secondary sources have already attributed quotes and information to the erroneous name.
When EO first covered this topic, we contacted several dozen editors and publications on Twitter regarding their online corrections policies. Based on click-throughs to the page containing our survey questions, there seemed to be considerable interest in the topic. Only a handful responded, however. Are editors generally reluctant to discuss their online correction protocols? Or perhaps they haven't developed concrete policies. It's still an open question.
Meredith Dias is senior editor at Editors Only and the STRAT newsletter.
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