Retraction

In a post earlier this week on citizen journalism I told how a story which began on David Pogue’s NY Times blog was further explored not only on my blog and that of Alex Saunders but also by commenters on all three blogs.  I then asserted “none of us, professional or amateur, has pressed the company itself for a reply.”  I was wrong.  To compound my mistake, I didn’t ask either David or Alex if they had contacted the company; I just assumed they hadn’t because they didn’t write anything about doing that.

David corrected me in a comment on my original post:

“You write: "But note that this isn’t all you should expect from journalism.... none of us, professional or amateur, has pressed the company itself for a reply."

“That's actually not true. *I* pressed the company head, Tom Doolin, for an explanation. Later, I even ran your theory by him (about arbitraging the terminating carrier fees).

“He refused to discuss it, and will say only that he may start using his built-up goodwill for advertising at some point.

“So I got nothing out of him, but that's not the same as saying I never inquired. :)

“--David Pogue”

A nice thing about blogging is the correction mechanisms.  David posted his correction while I was on a plane and it immediately appeared with the original post, immune from any editorial constraint. And, unlike traditional print, I can go back and correct the original article (I’m going to do that right now) so new readers won’t get bad information.

Better to be careful in the first place, though. Lesson learned for me.

Comments

[Brian Horey]

Bravo for owning up to an error and correcting it. It is worth highlighting the differences in method between how you handled the error and the way that newspapers do, both in print and online.

Your correction was noted both in a new post with "placement" equivalent to the placement of the original post containing the error, as well as in an addendum to the original post at the *beginning* of the post. Newspapers persist in using an asymmetric correction function that buries corrections (if indeed they are ever printed) in small type in an easy-to-miss location of the paper rather than giving the correction placement that is equivalent to that of the story that generated the error - insuring that 99% of the people the read the error will never see the correction. This apparently is justice in the newspaper business. As well, most online versions of papers that I read put the error at the bottom of a story (usually far enough below the end of the original that it can be missed if you don't scroll all the way down to the end of the page).

Newspapers could take a big step toward addressing their well earned reputations for lack of transparency and accountability by adopting your process for reporting errors (and I dare say the quality of the product would improve rather quickly if reporters knew their mistakes would receive placement as visible as their stories).