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.htmlIt'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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charles.r.matthews@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.htmlIt'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.
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
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'.
Although I don't think they should stop there, I think there's something to what they say. Long ago I worked in a library, and archived artifacts are sacred in that context. That a newspaper gets something wrong can have impacts, and their original articles should be part of the permanent record. If people edited the "Dewey Beats Truman" stories out of the record merely because they were wrong, it would be a terrible thing.
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.
I think this is mainly a historical artifact. It's only very recently that articles were even conceivably changeable, and newspapers see themselves as mainly about the new. What has changed here is that access to archives is now orders of magnitude easier. What took hours or days before now takes seconds.
It seems to me that places like Salon, digital from the beginning, have a different attitude to corrections. And even they are built out of people with print experience and print-focused training, so I think it will take a couple of decades before the industry catches up with your view.
But even then, there will be limits. A minor correction or a footnote isn't a big problem for them, and they'll get a lot better at that. Instead, I think there are two issues that will keep them from ever making people very happy.
The first is that at some point they have to stop writing drafts of history. A footnote is no problem, but at some point dealing with a correction request is equivalent to re-reporting the article. The constraints of their profession compel them pretty quickly accept an article as finished work that can be followed up with another article -- if the public is still interested enough in the topic.
When you accept that, the natural thought is that maybe they should write better first drafts. That sounds good, but I think writing a single article to a much higher level means doubling or more the resources for a single article. Economically that's infeasible with their current model unless they find some way, as bloggers have, of shifting most of the cost burden to readers and other writers.
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.
Excellent point. And to be fair, a lot of us personally apologize.
William
On 8/26/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
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'.
I disagree with you here. Already published articles are part of the historical record - they represent what was thought at the time that they were written.
Of course, it should be much much easier than it is to find corrections (they should probably just be attached to the original articles) but originals should not be altered. Keep in mind that we do the same thing by publishing the current version but retaining all prior versions of a page. We do better than many newspaper archives by making the "corrected" version the default display, but we still leave the originals intact.