Charlie Peters also had this item:
You may have seen on the front page of The Washington Post in late November the headline “Virginia wife slain after court denies protection.� ...A few days later, the Post ran two sentences in its correction box on page 2, saying that the original story “may have left the impression that the judge had refused� to grant the extension, and that in fact “additional documents show that the protective order was dismissed at the [wife's] request.� Are two sentences on page 2 enough to correct the erroneous main thrust of a front page story?
Obviously not. What to do with the complaint? Scott Rosenberg at Salon has an idea:
Software development teams have used bug tracking software for ages now -- why not journalists? ...The model doesn't map perfectly onto journalism, but it's not too far off: Let people file "bug reports" if they believe your publication has published something in need of correcting. The publication can respond however it seems appropriate: If the complaint is frivolous, you point that out; if it's a minor error of spelling or detail, you fix it; if it's a major error, you deal with it however you traditionally deal with major errors -- but you've left a trail that shows what happened.
He revisited the idea to answer comments and concludes:
I'm not suggesting that this idea is the single, one-fix-solves-all-problems answer to the ills of journalism today. It's a pragmatic, you-could-do-it-real-soon suggestion for beginning to deal with professional journalism's biggest problem: the public's loss of trust, which begins with the sense that media companies are big institutions that pay no attention to their own mistakes.
Agreed.
