PressEthic

Newspapers and magazines make mistakes. When they do, it’s their duty to correct or retract the statements made.

In my daily reading of the newspapers, I rarely see these corrections. Maybe I just miss the days they happen. More likely, I just can’t easily find them. After all, they tend to make major headlines only when the mistake is as newsworthy as the story it occurred in, as in the current corrections being made as to the exaggerations and misunderstandings surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

Buzz Machine noted these corrections, and writer Jeff Jarvis apologized for his part in spreading the false information. I noticed right away. Why? Because blog entries are arranged in chronological order, not order of importance. Thus, retractions are as obvious as anything else posted.

Jarvis is not the only one apologizing for his coverage. Trip Jennings at Epicocity apologized for misspelling a subject’s name in a blog post that immediately followed – and was just as prominent as – the entry containing the error.

And a mistake I would not have picked up on at all (I know very little about computers), made at SEO Black Hat, was corrected here, where QuadsZilla offers to donate to the Canadian Breat Cancer Foundation as penance.

Dean at Dean’s World also apologized for making an unfair inference.

These lesser-known blogs make their corrections in plain type for everyone to see, and if you didn’t check frequently enough, you might well see the retraction before you see the mistake. Bloggers seem to be owning up to their mistakes – possibly because they are among the first to jump on the mistakes of others.

So what does this mean? On one level, it appears to be another way that bloggers are gaining ground as reputable journalists. As Prof. Penenberg pointed out in class, internet journalists tend to hold themselves to high standards because the public at large is still very skeptical of their accuracy and integrity. Prominently pointing out every mistake helps this.

Also, the very nature of blogs makes this simpler. One could set up a side link to a page full of nothing but retractions that the average reader is unlikely to visit, but as a blogger myself, I know that creating such a side page can be difficult or impossible (depending who is hosting your blog, what they allow, and how good you are with HTML), and it can cost more money, once the blogger has addressed space, bandwidth, and permission from the host. It is simpler and easier for the blogger to give these corrections equal weight.

One cannot blame the newspapers for not following this example. After all, no two stories in the New York Times receive equal weight; placement, page space, and headline size prioritize for the reader, and most retractions are neither large nor, in the eyes of most people, hard-hitting.

Still, it is admirable how ready bloggers appear to be to own up to their mistakes, and the print media might want to consider following their lead, at least in terms of attitude.