RON ROSENBAUM has an interesting piece on journalists, bloggers, and error correction:
I’ve been thinking about this subject for a number of reasons. For one thing, the new realm of the “blogosphere” has focused attention in a more vigilant way on the errors made by “dead-tree journalists”—and by other bloggers as well. The ease of making corrections on the Web has made the exposure of errors made by dead-tree journalists—and the pressure to correct those errors—greater than ever. And it has opened up a whole new set of questions about the correction of errors.
It’s a very interesting piece, which should be read by both journalists and bloggers alike. My corrections policy — er, to the extent you can call it a “policy” — is that factual errors will be fixed in the original post, since that’s the one that people will link to. If it’s important, and the original post has scrolled far enough that I think people won’t notice the correction, I’ll put a pointer up top. If the error is minor, and I notice it very shortly after a post, I’ll just go back and fix it in the text. If enough time has passed, or if the error is such that I think that the change will make links to it nonsensical, I’ll note the correction in an update. If it’s a stylistic error — often a harsh word that I decide to soften after seeing it on the screen, occasionally something that’s not quite as clear as I thought when I typed it — I generally don’t note the change.
Anyway, that’s pretty much how I operate, but I don’t have a Department of Corrections here, with a Corrections Policy Manual. It’s just me. And I’m not suggesting that this is how everyone should operate. I do find the “stealth correction” policy of places like the BBC a bit irritating, as I’ll occasionally link to one of their stories with a complaint, then get email a few hours later from people saying “but they do talk about X, even though you say they don’t.” (In once case, the “X” item — at the moment, I’ve forgotten what it was — was originally absent, then appeared at the bottom of the BBC story, then gradually migrated to the second paragraph over a period of hours. I think at some point in this process Kevin Drum accused me of making the whole thing up, then retracted his accusation when he realized the BBC was making changes to the story.) Still “stealth corrections” are better than no corrections, I guess. And there’s something perhaps a bit too self-important about posting an audit-trail note every time you make a minor stylistic edit to a post. It’s all a question of balance, and reasonable people may disagree about where the balance-point is.
Greg Djerejian has observations, too. He notes the role of Technorati — though lately I’ve found it so slow as to be not terribly useful. There’s trackback, too, but it only works with blogs, and then only if you remember to ping the URL. But the technology keeps improving, and it’s already a lot better than newsprint.
UPDATE: Jim Miller has a post saying that I’m better at correcting errors than Atrios is. I’m happy for the praise, but I don’t know whether that’s really something that you can quantify in any useful way. As I say, most of this stuff involves judgment calls about which reasonable people can differ.