Nothing wrings a reporter’s innards quite like being tersely informed there is an error in a piece of work he’s published.

However, the queasy stomach and glowering editor are a dozen roses next to the eye-popping terror of seeing the inevitable correction globally publicised … courtesy of Regret The Error, a three-year old weblog addressing corrections in mass media.

But for the hoards (dwindling though they may be) of everyday citizens who get their news from the mainstream media, sites like this one, whose Canada-based author, Craig Silverman, is the author of a recently published book by the same name as his blog, are entirely reassuring: at least there’s one place to go where it’s easy to check up on the writers and reporters who ladle out the daily bulletins.

Some of the corrections on the site are quite funny (well, if you’re neither the writer of the offending piece nor a source who has been misquoted or identified):

“Reader Deborah drew our attention to an unfortunate typo in a Nov. 23 story in the San Antonio Express-News. Headlined, “Art to go,” it was about a program that “sends teaching artists into schools and social-service agencies throughout the community.
And:
The goal is to encourage students to be creative in an era when funding for the arts has been slashed to the bone.
“We’re like a finger in the dyke,” says Paula Owen, president of the Southwest School, about the program.””

Or, from the Guardian:
“A cable television company has apologised to customers after accidentally broadcasting a pornography channel instead of the scheduled BBC programmes.
Smallworld viewers in Scotland, who had been watching Life on Mars, were waiting for the Ten O’Clock News but were shocked to see sexually explicit images on their screens, while BBC2 viewers were confronted with X-rated footage instead of Jeremy Paxman and Newsnight.
The Ayrshire-based cable firm mistakenly aired the pornographic content, from adult channel Climax 3, to customers for two hours until the mix-up was discovered at midnight and the plug pulled on the offending material…”

But overall, Silverman’s goal is not to harass or poke fun. As he says in a 2006 Q&A, the idea behind his blog is to help the mainstream media, not poke fun of it.

To fulfill that aim, peppers his blog, which is updated daily, with terse comments and witty headlines pointing to the dearth of information – or the ridiculousness (like misspelling the word ‘misspelling’) – of a correction. In this way, he draws attention to the fact that perhaps worse than a correction is a poorly done correction.

Silverman is also wont to post sprigs of analysis, rather than merely re-running corrections. And he keeps tabs on the correction policies of various global media, monitoring the industry trends and standards. He calls attention to news groups that don’t have online correction pages – for example, a chain of large English-language newspaper chains in Canada has no online corrections section.

Silverman also links to the correction pages of more than two dozen newspapers and magazines – which makes it easy for his readers to see, for example, what was corrected in the International Herald Tribune or Daily Mirror they read yesterday.

He also cranks out yearly analysis of corrections, which was sited this year by a number of prominent media watchdogs and bloggers, including Poynter Institute’ Jim Romanesko.

One of the most common mistakes in 2007: Confusing the spelling of the surname of Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the American presidency, with the forename of terrorist Osama bin Laden.

 

Published: January 4, 2008