CBS Mobile's report was wrong; Spain beat the Netherlands, 1-0.
How many news sites make it easy for readers to report errors? Very few, according to MediaBugs, a pilot project in the San Francisco area that’s trying to hold the news media accountable and get them to fix “correctable mistakes.” The group reports that three-quarters of news sites it examined offer no links to report corrections.
Many bury information about how to report errors behind confusing trails of links. Some provide multiple, poorly labeled avenues for feedback without telling readers which ones to use for error reports. Others provide no access to recently corrected articles beyond a search on “corrections,” which often turns up multiple stories about prisons.
More than half of the 28 sites–newspapers, TV stations and others in the San Francisco area– “have no corrections policy or substantive corrections content at all.” That’s worse than what a national NewsLab survey found almost 10 years ago, when just a quarter of the TV journalists we surveyed said they worked in newsrooms with no clear-cut corrections policy. You’d think it would be easier to correct errors online but apparently it’s not being done.
MediaBugs is pushing to change that. The nonprofit, funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, thinks every site should have a “report an error” link displayed as prominently as the ubiquitous “share” and “email” links on every page. They’ve even developed a widget for Bay Area news organizations to let readers easily report problems through MediaBugs; so far, only Spot.Us is using it.
More transparency
In the meantime, readers and staffers are reporting errors through the MediaBugs site and having some success in getting them corrected, although it can take a while. In the process, readers can learn more about how mistakes happen, as when KCBS radio news director Ed Cavagnaro explained why two people who were quoted online weren’t named.
“Yes, the people interviewed should have been identified in the website version of the story, as they were in the on-air report,” Cavagnaro wrote. “In fairness to the webwriter, he didn’t have the spelling of the names. We still have to remind our broadcast reporters that we need the spelling of the names of interview subjects for the text versions of the story.” Now that’s transparency.
The MediaBugs project seems like a useful experiment but in my view it would be ever so much better if individual newsrooms just made it easy for readers to report errors on individual stories. USA Today is one of the few sites I’ve seen that already does this consistently, with a note and an email link at the bottom of every story: “To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones.”
To their credit, the folks at MediaBugs say that approach would be fine with them, too. So who else is actually doing it? And if not, why not?
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