You might not think so, but corrections are crucial

May 24, 2003

Hundreds of newspapers around the country that subscribe to the New York Times News Service, including this one, were burned by Times reporter Jayson Blair's errors and fabrications. We published corrections to several of his stories after the Times ran its four-page exploration of its problems and Blair's.

We take that very personally.

No doubt there are exceptions, but it's a fair generalization to say journalists hate having to do corrections. But that doesn't mean trying to avoid running them when they're justified. If I accidentally touch something hot and jerk my hand away, I hate it when that happens. But I am also well aware that without that protective reflex I would suffer much worse burns.

Blair had reportedly piled up 50 published corrections in his four years at the paper. That sounds stratospheric to me, though the Times is known for its assiduous corrections policy. However, it wasn't nearly as many as there should have been, since after his downfall they managed to find a further 7,000 words' worth of corrections that should have been made sooner.

The question is, why weren't the Times' protective reflexes working? One reason, it appears, is that fewer people than you would expect ask for corrections even when they believe the newspaper has made a factual error.

For example, when my ex-husband died in 1996, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune published an obituary that contained a couple of errors. I didn't ask them for a correction. Why didn't I? The errors were trifling, and I couldn't see that anyone would ever care. He'd remarried, and I thought perhaps his widow should be the one to object, if anyone did. And finally, I didn't blame the newspaper; they just used information provided by the college where he taught.

Good enough arguments, but the wrong conclusion. A formal correction goes into the paper's archives, attached to the original story. If it's not there, people will keep repeating the same error.

Well, perhaps not about my late ex-husband, who probably won't be making news any more. But you understand the general principle.

The Associated Press Managing Editors last week used its interactive e-mail network to ask readers why they don't report corrections, and many of the responses were less benign than mine (go to apme.com and click on "credibility roundtables" for the story). One reader said that the errors she sees aren't mistakes, but rather "deliberate embellishments or fabrications to make the story more interesting."

Others believe newspapers don't care about mistakes and won't listen to them, or think it would just take too much time to get a correction.

Another reader told APME "I think the issue of media credibility revolves more around what is not reported than what is."

In a post on the Web log Instapundit.com, Glenn Reynolds said about corrections, "Fix errors promptly, prominently, and add the correction to the original story on the website. Putting corrections in an inconspicuous separate column, where you usually can't even understand the original error in context (as, say, The New York Times and a host of other papers do) and you're not really running corrections at all."

Well, now, Page 2 does not count as "inconspicuous" real estate in the newspaper; it's where our publisher chooses to put his column, after all. Corrections are in a separate column so that readers always know where to look for them -- scattered through the paper, they'd be impossible to find. And where should we put the correction if the same story appeared in different places, or even on different days, in various editions? We can't very well go back and put them into a previous day's paper.

But Reynolds' point about Web corrections is well taken. Our policy is to correct the error on the paper's Web site, but we don't usually note that the correction was made and we probably should -- which is what Reynolds does on his site.

I'd also like to see Web sites develop into places where readers could discuss not just factual errors, but other reasons why they are or are not satisfied with news coverage. The letters page does that to some extent, but space for letters is limited. I think those discussions would suggest lots of stories that need to be written and improve the quality of those that are.

In the meantime, if you see something that you believe warrants correction, don't wait for someone else to tell us. You're elected.