The New Rules on Corrections

At a time when journalism conventions are changing rapidly, and print publications are cutting staff and reducing page sizes, at least one tradition remains: the correction box typically posted on the bottom of page 2.

It has long been the place to find out about yesterday's mistakes, and to feel vindicated after alerting an editor that your aunt Beth's last name was spelled wrong. There's a pretty simple rule about when to run a print correction: If there's a confirmed factual error, set it straight. If the word "too" appeared when the sentence called for "to," well, then, let your English teachers foam at the mouth, confront your copy editor by the snack machine...and move on.

Some of the same rules apply to online news sites, which have the luxury of making instantaneous changes. You won't find editors alerting readers of punctuation errors, and you'd like to think that major factual errors would get the ol' "Editor's note: This passage has been changed from its original version" treatment.

But there's undoubtedly a larger gray area for when to correct online mistakes. What if it's 7:15 a.m. and a reporter notices he attributed a quote to the wrong source. He calls the editor, who makes the change. Do you run a correction with the story, even if it attracts attention to an error that few people ever saw?

Then there's the question of whether readers even know where to find these online versions of correction boxes. It's been noted that a large percentage of daily newspaper Web sites don't have such a link on their home page -- if at all.

Still, some of the most popular sites do due diligence on this front. The New York Times puts its correction link on the left bar of its home page, in between the classifieds and crosswords links. (Not a far cry from a virtual page 2 treatment.) The L.A. Times gives corrections a similar treatment. MSNBC also gives prominent play to its correction link, as does Salon.com.

What's missing, though, is consistency and transparency. News sites would do well by readers to include a corrections link on the home page. This link should take readers to a page that has a real-time list of corrections made (however small). That way, even if the editor in my 7:15 scenario above decides not to draw attention to the error by noting the correction in the story, a curious reader could still find out what a previous version of the story said.

Editor's Note: I accidentally published this post the first time without making sure it was the final version. As a wise man once wrote: D'oh!