This morning’s Romenesko brought this link to a Sacramento Bee column about how some newspapers have begun to use databases to track errors and corrections. Reasonable enough, but maybe not far enough, and it got me thinking.
Software development teams have used bug tracking software for ages now — why not journalists? But keeping it in-house, as the papers the Bee cites seem to do, limits the value of the approach.
I’m spending a lot of time these days around open-source software developers, and they take the logic of this approach one step further: Major open source projects maintain public bug databases. Anyone can come along and post a bug report. It’s like opening a trouble ticket: developers will have a look, see if your complaint is new or duplicates an existing problem; over time the database provide a permanent record of the resolution (or non-resolution) of the issue.
The model doesn’t map perfectly onto journalism, but it’s not too far off: Let people file “bug reports” if they believe your publication has published something in need of correcting. The publication can respond however it seems appropriate: If the complaint is frivolous, you point that out; if it’s a minor error of spelling or detail, you fix it; if it’s a major error, you deal with it however you traditionally deal with major errors — but you’ve left a trail that shows what happened. However you respond, you’ve opened a channel of communication, so that people who feel you’ve goofed don’t just go off to their corners (or their blogs!) feeling that you’re unresponsive and irresponsible.
I know this idea will horrify a lot of editors and reporters, but I think an adventurous newsroom could benefit from the transparency and the accountability. Maybe someone’s already doing this out there — if so, it would be great to see what we can learn.
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