charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote:
William Pietri wrote
The New York Times has a public editor, an
ombudsman-like role,
currently filled by Clark Hoyt. He has just written an article where he
examines the same problem we face with BLPs of marginal figures:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/opinion/26pubed.html
It's exciting to see sources coming to grips with the problems we've
been dealing with for a while. Interesting that they only get one
complaint a day; I gather our numbers are higher.
Yes, very interesting. Journalists are so charming. "We can't change the article
because it is part of the historical record." Such confusion. Journalism is only ever
'the first draft of history'. Newpapers are notoriously bad at publishing adequate
apologies and corrections: no real prominence given. And now it turns out that not only
are they not interested in doing a second draft, they regard the first draft as part of
the 'historical record', not to be tampered with.
They could of course footnote those old, erroneous articles to show exactly how wrong
they got it. This would be good for scholars. Rather worse for the newspaper's
reputation, of course.
I'm rather cheered about WP's model. I was asked last night whether WP posts
apologies. No, we don't, but rather than a formulaic expression of regret, we can move
fast to fix things up and have fewer pretensions about always being right.
Charles
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It really doesn't look to me like they're doing too bad, they do offer
people to put corrections on the old articles when someone can offer
proof. I think they should probably consider extending that to updates
as well, even brief ones (for example, at the bottom of the story:
UPDATE: J. Accused Criminal was found not guilty of all charges against
him on January 1, 2001.) But, of course, it's very easy for us to offer
updates, our whole model is designed to allow and encourage that. I
think Old Media is still very much in a period of adjustment to the
Internet Age.
I do agree with them on one thing, though. Correct, yes, do it as
quickly as possible, yes, remove, no. Even the fact that the NYT got
something 100% dead wrong and had to correct the whole thing is part of
the historical record, and a correction saying "We totally screwed this
story up and said all this about the wrong person" would protect that
person from any harm, probably -better- than outright removal would,
since that would be available to show to anyone who ran across the
previous story.