NATHAN ASHBY-KUHLMAN > Blog entries from December 2002

Correct errors, but also acknowledge them

Is there any evidence that “the speed and the immediacy of the Internet makes it more likely that online news sites will rush information out without careful checking and verification, and therefore be prone to more errors”? Robert Berkman posed that question on Poynter’s “online-news” e-mail list last week.

There are some great responses. David K. Every says the Web’s speed and immediacy actually allows errors to be corrected more quickly when they do occur, rather than waiting 24 hours for the next newspaper. If Web sites lived up to that potential, Every suggests, they could on balance be more accurate than other mediums.

To live up to that potential, I have argued, news sites first have to actually make corrections to the original articlessomething some newspapers are not doing. Second, and this is critical, they need to preserve a copy of corrected articles in their original form, with a changelog. Without preserving the original, as Norbert Specker notes on the online-news list, the mistakes never happened. If news sites won’t do it themselves, Specker recommends an “independent body” that would keep copies of pages as they changed.

A section of Beau Dure’s graduate school research project, also mentioned on the online-news list, reminds news sites they violate traditional journalistic values by failing to acknowledge that they made mistakes and/or fixed them:

The Web sites [in Dure’s study], including the newspaper and television Web sites, do not acknowledge the mistake; it is simply removed from the site. This approach is at odds with the traditional approaches shown by the newspaper and television journalists.... Still, some readers will have seen incorrect information and may not be aware of the mistake unless they read the updated version of the same story.

Are there any news sites that do fess up when they make mistakes, in a way that works on the Web? Yes; Adrian Holovaty has found several. But I still haven’t seen any news sites that preserve the articles’ original versions for history. Given how easy that would be in a content management system, are online publishers trying to hide the fact that they make mistakes?

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Ads in a list of news stories

What were they thinking? The Heber Springs (Ark.) Sun-Times runs links to advertisements on its local news page right between links to news stories. News and unlabeled ads appear in the exact same style:

The link to an ad for 'Drasco Trading Post,' calling itself 'A Unique Shopping Experience,' has the exact same styling as the headlines and abstracts for two news stories it appears between.

The ad for “Drasco Trading Post” is even worse than the masquerading house ad that The (Columbia, S.C.) State ran last month. The Sun-Times’ advertisers are essentially buying placement of their ad as a news item, whether or not it’s marketed that way.

Newspapers have always run advertorials, but I think the critical issue is whether they are labeled as ads. Advertorials should always be labeled. When their formatting is identical to editorial content it is total evil not to label them.

Does the Sun-Times really want to join the ranks of evil user-unfriendly search engines that don’t disclose “sponsored links”? Selling ads to pay the bills is fine. Presenting an unlabeled ad in the middle of a list of news stories is not.

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Name your sections carefully







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Intelligent relative dates










<script type="text/javascript">
dateReference("Dec 19 2002");
<noscript>Dec. 19, 2002</noscript>


There are further problems:



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