Corrections and Revisions

Key Takeaways:

• When a story is edited post-publication, most sites make an effort to note the change.

– Major substantive errors, misquotations and factual mistakes are fixed in the story and noted in a correction notice.

– Minor errors are often corrected via strikethrough.

– Trivial typos are usually corrected without notice.

• Some sites are beginning to provide Wikipedia-style “history” or “revisions” features that let readers track all changes made to a story after its initial publication.
• Most sites won’t take down a whole story or post after it’s published except in the rarest of circumstances, and any such “unpublishing” calls for an explanation to readers.

Commenters find corrections

There’s an understanding that we’re getting them the story as it happens in some cases, and it may change.

Typically the people who find the corrections are the commenters. They’re very good that way, they’re the best copy editors around.

Typically the people who find the corrections are the commenters. They’re very good that way, they’re the best copy editors around. So with stupid stuff like a typo we’ll just correct it, and in comments we might say, thanks, it’s been corrected.

If we published a story and it turns out we got the street wrong, we’ll just do a strike-through, and put the correct street right after it. So it’s transparent we made a mistake. If it’s something that’s been up for a while and it’s more involved, we’ll put something that says, you know, “updated” – we’ve learned that this has happened. But if we just made a big error, we’ll be a little more contrite about it and put it in there as a full correction.

Be up front about changes

My thing has always been transparency. If a post has been changed, note that it has been changed. I’m personally a fan of the strike-through approach – strike through the information and put a note in that information has been changed. Tacking it down at the bottom seems to be appropriate.

If you take stuff down, you tell people you took it down. I once posted something mean that I thought was making fun of another publication. When I reread it I was, like, what was I thinking? I was just in a bad mood and taking it out on the world. And I took the post down. But I posted another note and I said, “I posted a rant that was really immature, I shouldn’t have done it because I was making fun of a reporter and it could be construed as making fun of a community, and I would never do that.”

Make changes, but don’t pull stories down

The most frequent thing that got brought to me as an ethical question or quandary from staff was, hey, we’ve got this person that wants this thing to go away.

All news sites struggle with the fact that once I post something about you, particularly if I’m a well-SEOed news site, it’s gonna be out there, front and center, forever. It’s the classic case: Scott is accused of murder, and then three months later he’s acquitted, but even if there was a story saying he was acquitted, the accused story has better SEO, so it’s going to be the top story for you forever.

You don’t change the news, you don’t take down something. It happened!

When we had that situation we generally would not post a new story saying Scott was acquitted. Instead, we would do an update to the original story. But even that wasn’t enough in some cases, and we were constantly getting requests to take down stories. We’ll update it. But, you know, you don’t change the news, you don’t take down something. It happened!

Automatic revision tracking

We had a story about a labyrinth here. It has a very spiritual component, one of the students had interviewed a woman who had a PhD in the field, who felt she was misquoted. So we made that correction, and in that case we linked to the revision that showed what was corrected.

One of the things we’re talking about is how we can make better use of that system. It’s too obscure right now. And we’re not annotating our revisions well. We’ve been letting the system log its revisions on its own. That’s great but it creates a revision for every little change, and some of those are styling or formatting. So you can’t always see the signal from the noise.

But we’re not out any labor in including this on the site right now – it’s automatic, it runs seamlessly inside Drupal now.

Make it a competition

We gave a class an assignment with vague directions to create something that builds excitement, gets citizens involved with making our news site better. And they developed this proposal for the “Show Me the Errors” contest [where readers win prizes for submitting the most error reports each month]. We launched it in October. It’s been a lot of fun. One guy has won like three of the last four months. There was kind of a throwdown a couple of weeks ago, internally, in which there was a challenge made to silence him — to give him nothing that he could send in a correction about. Of course he found stuff anyway. It’s kind of a friendly competition there.

It is overwhelmingly grammatical, punctuation, proper names. Occasionally there are fact-based things. So for instance today, “Glengarry Glen Ross” – we put a comma between Glengarry and Glen Ross. But there have been some pretty serious, egregious factual errors too. There were a slew of five on one story in which we just blew every name, time, winning time, it was a track meet or something – just awful. Which is also the bittersweet pill here. It’s great that we’re catching all these things, and it sucks that we’re catching all these things!

Next page →

Share your story below: How do you handle corrections?

• Site editors place errors into three rough categories (though these distinctions can be hard to draw).
  • Some sites are beginning to provide Wikipedia-style “history” or “revisions” features that let readers track all changes made to a story after its initial publication.
  • Most sites won’t take down a whole story or post after it’s published except in the rarest of circumstances, and any such “unpublishing” calls for an explanation to readers.