Getting a fix on online corrections

By Bonnie Bressers

Few newspaper-based Web sites have developed clear and comprehensive policies for correcting errors that appear online, causing new media experts to warn the industry about the loss of its most precious asset: credibility.

The number of U.S. newspapers online soared from about 20 in 1994 to 3,419 in 2000, according to Eric K. Meyer, a journalism faculty member at the University of Illinois.

But the development of online sites has outpaced the development of practices and policies that reflect the standards of traditional journalism, practitioners say.

“How online sites handle corrections and clarifications is an element within that discussion,” said Aly Colón, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“Everything you can do to convince your users that they can trust you will draw more users to you in the long run, if you survive the long run,” Colón added.

Indeed, a study launched in 1997 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that factual errors and spelling or grammar mistakes in newspapers were among the top reasons for the public’s perception that media credibility is low.

“Without credibility, journalists have nothing,” Colón said. “Without credibility we are just making noise. Period.”

The trouble with techies

Some new media journalists suggest that lack of traditional standards, including online corrections policies, stems from the fact that the earliest Web workers often came from the newspaper’s technical ranks. It was the “techie in the newsroom” who was drawn to the first phase of Web development — getting the site up and running — because that required more technical skills than journalistic expertise.

“People were getting things in motion and putting it up, and there wasn’t time and staff to deal with the niceties,” said Frank Sennett, a features editor at MTVi and co-creator of Newcity.com.

Sennett, who hopes to drive the discussion about corrections and clarifications with his Web site, Slipup.com, says the industry is maturing now and “it’s an appropriate time to deal with this. The grace period is clearly over and no excuses are acceptable at this point.”

The stakes are particularly high in the online world, practitioners say, because online sites carry the brand and reputation of their host newspapers even if the Web operations are separate entities staffed by non-journalists.

But Paul McAfee, the news and operations manager of InlandEmpireOnline.com, which is associated with the 161,600-circulation Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., predicts a progression of Web development that will result in the inclusion of more people with journalistic orientations.

Online sites, McAfee says, are realizing that more traditional journalists are needed to edit copy and make editorial decisions and judgement calls that technical people are not trained to do.

“We’re not standing alone with that philosophy, it’s the direction it’s going,” he said. “Because of the immediacy of our medium it’s even more important to be accurate, to have a minimum of errors, and to have people trained to locate potential libel or objectionable content.”

To fix or correct, that is the question

That immediacy also presents some of the thornier ethical issues for new media practitioners dealing with corrections policies: If an error is caught 20 seconds after it’s posted, can the story be “fixed” or is a formal correction necessary? If 20 seconds is not the threshold for formal corrections, is 20 minutes? If a story is modified, should the reader be told? Should corrections policies be different for high-traffic pages versus pages with low viewership?

Some sites, such as Salon.com, have established procedures that have evolved over time. If the mistake is considered trivial, which Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg defines as a misspelled name, the story will be fixed without notification to the reader. More substantive errors are corrected within the text, and notification is placed at the end of the story. Each corrections is linked to a site-wide corrections page accessible from the main menu bar.

“We’re all kind of groping through this together trying to figure it out,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t want to distract readers every time we fix a comma. On the other hand, we don’t want the fact that it’s easy to fix a Web page to give us an overly convenient cover on those occasions when we do screw up. You can fix an error and pretend you never made it. That rankles anyone who sees journalism as having a sense of history.”

Dianne Lynch, a journalism faculty member at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt., who has written about online ethics, says news organizations should tell readers what they know.

“That eliminates the gray area and the debate,” Lynch said. “Tell readers what you know and they can make decisions about whether you are operating ethically. So, you tell the readers you made a mistake and you’re correcting it.”

That’s the philosophy at Arkansas Online, the online service of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a 175,000-circulation newspaper in Little Rock. In Arkansas Online’s extensive three-pronged corrections approach, the text of the online story is corrected in red and a note on the top of the story tells readers the story was amended. The correction also is prominently noted on the index page where the headline of the offending story is located and on the page that lists the PDF files of the actual newspaper pages.

That’s “a tremendous time drain,” said Online Editor Bruce W. Oakley, a former Knight Fellow whose 1997 study of electronic archive accuracy suggested an industry wide problem. “But there is no simple way to have accuracy or accurate archives in any of our media. You must have quality control and you must have diligent people.”

Audience doesn’t care; lawyers will

In that sense, corrections cost money and some sites don’t feel the benefits outweigh the costs, Lynch says. That reticence, she says, is coupled with the unique demographic of the Web: Young readers, who are not well versed on the traditional standards of journalism, use a mix of commercial sites and news sites without expecting to see corrections in either.

“So what’s the push to do it? Credibility,” Lynch said.

The legal issues also provide motivation, say new media practitioners who worry about the ramifications if — for whatever reason — corrections published in the newspaper are not published online. And the fact that some online news sites have permanent archives accessible to all exacerbates their concerns.

“This is too important to ignore,” said John McQuiggan, director of site operations for philly.com, whose partners include the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. “If you’re going to publish information and you know something is incorrect you are under an obligation to fix it, particularly when it’s online for days or weeks or longer. It’s even more of a burden for online because it’s not in the bird cage the next morning.”

There could be novel areas of legal attack, he said. People could say the online site had the means to tell readers about an error, but didn’t. Or they could say the industry has lower standards for corrections online.

Publishing the wrong information in the first place creates the legal liability, says Paul Bargren, a media attorney with the Milwaukee (Wis.) office of Foley & Lardner who was a journalist for 20 years. Publishing corrections doesn’t relieve the newspaper of liability, it merely helps mitigate damages.

Still, “a defamation lawyer would like nothing better than to get up and argue to the jury that they knew it was wrong and never corrected it,” Bargren said. “And a newspaper that doesn’t take prompt steps to correct something that’s obviously wrong plays into the perception that newspapers are arrogant. Juries seem willing to punish newspapers that seem to get arrogant. The threat is out there.”

Bargren recommends that online news sites develop written policies, although he’s quick to add that other attorneys could disagree.

“Make it a simply policy that if a correction runs in the newspaper it needs to posted and made available with the original story on the Web,” he said. “A correction could be incorporated into a revised version, but it still would be best to let the reader know. The story online needs to make clear that is has been corrected.”

Lack of procedures for correcting errors reflects the speed with which the Web has become a factor in modern life, Bargren said. While newspapers have had hundreds of years to sort out the issues, online sites have had only a few years or, in some cases, less.

“A lot of these issues have arisen without time to consider them,” he said. “And, obviously, things are still shaking out at all levels.”

Bressers, the R.M. Seaton visiting professor of journalism at Kansas State University in Manhattan, was most recently managing editor of the online edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.