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The Wall Street Journal: Cavalier about corrections?

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Last week I wrote about my fruitless quest to alert the Wall Street Journal to a mistake it had made in a book review — misspelling the name of the author the piece mainly focused on.

Yesterday I made one final effort to close this loop; I emailed the book review’s author, Philip Delves Broughton. Broughton responded quickly and courteously, agreed that it was a mistake (one he’d been responsible for), and noted that as a freelance contributor all he could do was notify the book review’s editor.

As of today this mistake, now 11 days old, remains uncorrected. In the face of my persistent and no doubt annoying barrage of emails, phone calls, and blog posts, the Journal newsroom has remained entirely mum.

Now, there are a few ways to read this situation. You could say: Who cares? It’s just a misspelling of somebody’s name.

If it’s your name, of course, you may care a great deal. If you’re the author, you might care not just for vanity, but for the sake of the people who might be Googling your writing or looking your book up to purchase it on Amazon.

In this case, the author, Mac McClelland, happens, right now, to be doing some on-the-ground reporting from the Gulf oil spill for Mother Jones. If you were her, you might want readers to connect the book review with the in-the-news byline.

So another possible response is: The Journal’s editors and reporters are very busy people. They’ve got financial meltdowns to cover. Why are you harassing them with this trivia?

That’s just fine — unless the Journal actually cares whether its readers trust its coverage. If a news outlet can’t be bothered to get an author’s name right, can you count on it to get the financial stories right?

I’m sorry, but none of these responses is adequate. Until and unless we get a more plausible response, the only interpretation that makes sense is a very sad one: that the Wall Street Journal, once one of the world’s great trusted news institutions, lacks a functioning correction process. Or it simply doesn’t care about sweating the details any more.

UPDATE: This post is now linked to from Romenesko, and the very first comment there provides a nice illustration of my argument. Mark Jackson writes, “Really? This is a big deal to you? Column inches. Limited space. Priorities. Possibly the world financial system crashing was a bigger issue? Just sayin’.”

It seems to me that the Journal has every right to say, “We no longer have the resources to fix small errors like misspelled names. You should no longer count on us getting that stuff right.”

Something tells me no editor at the paper is likely to say that. Because when most of us signed on as journalists we signed on for the small stuff too. And readers expect that — and expect some kind of response from the newsroom when they point out an error.

[Crossposted at the MediaBugs blog]

How hard is it to report an error to the Wall Street Journal? Hard.

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The correction process is a simple thing in most newsrooms, right? If the news outlet gets something wrong, people will tell the editors — they’ll email or call or post a comment on the website. And then the editors will correct the mistake.

End of story? If only.

One of the early field results of the MediaBugs experiment is a simple one. It turns out that, in the case of many news organizations, including some pretty prominent ones, just figuring out how to tell the newsroom that there’s a problem requires persistence and stamina.

Consider this anonymous error report we received at MediaBugs a few days ago. It said that the Wall Street Journal, in a recent book review, had misspelled the name of the author being reviewed. The book is Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. The Journal spelled her name “McLelland.” (The publisher’s page listing the book, which I’ll take as an authoritative source, spells it with the extra “c.”)

Now, MediaBugs is focused on Bay Area-based news organizations and coverage, and — while we’ll handle reports that focus on the Journal’s Bay Area coverage — we’re not going to deal with most of the paper’s content. So we marked the McClelland report “off topic.”

But I figured that it did seem to be a real mistake, albeit a small one (but not that small, unless you think misspelling the name of the central subject of an article is not a big deal). If I were an editor at the Journal I’d want to know about it and correct it. So as a courtesy I set out to inform the newspaper.

My first stop was the story’s comments, where I thought I’d just post the information and let the Journal editors glean it at their leisure. The page had zero comments, so I figured my note would not be lost in a sea of rants.

I wrote a brief note about the problem, then discovered that I would need to register at the Journal site before they’d accept my comment. So I registered and confirmed my email address, re-entered my comment, and clicked “post.” Nothing happened. I tried again with a different browser, guessing that there might be some browser-specific posting bug. No luck with either Firefox or Safari. No wonder the story has zero comments! So much for that feedback channel. (To try to figure out what the problem was, I took a look at the next day’s Journal books piece. It had five comments — so sometimes, I gues,s the comments work. Interestingly, these comments reported errors in that review: it contained impossible, self-contradictory dates. These errors were reported five days ago. The piece has not been corrected.)

For my second approach, I looked for some link on the Journal site for “corrections” or “report an error.” No such link exists on the Journal home page, nor did searching voluminous “Help” and “Customer Service” pages turn up anything. The “Contact us” page offers three general email addresses for feedback, labeled as follows:

Send a comment/inquiry about an article or feature in The Wall Street Journal to: wsjcontact@dowjones.com.

React to something you’ve read on WSJ.com at: newseditors@wsj.com.

Offer a comment/suggestion about features and content on WSJ.com at: feedback@wsj.com.

I challenge anyone who is not a part of the WSJ organization to interpret which of these three lines of inquiry would be an appropriate choice to report an error. Apparently there’s a distinction between responding to the print and Web editions of the Journal, but what about with stories that appear in both places, as is the case for so much Journal content? And what are we supposed to make of the distinction between “reacting to something you’ve read” and “offering a comment/suggestion about features and content”?

I opted for door number one, since I was reporting a mistake in the printed Journal and that seemed to be the choice relating to the newspaper as opposed to Web-only material. But plainly I was grasping at straws. I sent a polite note to the wsjcontact address, and copied it for good measure to the managing and executive editors’ addresses that were also listed on the Contact page. This was two days ago.

For my third effort, I resorted to the good old telephone. The Journal only lists a single phone number on its Contact page, so I called it. It turns out to be an automated inbox for the entire Dow Jones operation. So you walk your way through the voice menu patiently, only to end up at a recording that tells you there’s no one to receive your call but you’re welcome to leave a message.

So that’s what I just did. I will now rest from my labors. We’ll see if any of these efforts elicits a response, or whether this post somehow prods the Journal beast from its slumber.

I went to these lengths because, right now, this is my work. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about normal members of the public. They won’t jump through these hoops. They will conclude — rightly or wrongly but very understandably, either way — that the newsroom doesn’t actually care about hearing about its mistakes.

If we want to understand why people don’t trust the media, this might be a very good place to start.

[Crossposted to the MediaBugs blog]

“Failsafe” is an oxymoron: BP’s Gulf spill and the St. Francis Dam

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I listened to this interview yesterday with BP director Robert Dudley on the News Hour:

ROBERT DUDLEY: …The blowout preventers are something that are used on oil and gas wells all over the world, every well. They just are designed not to fail with multiple failsafe systems. That has failed. So, we have a crisis.

…JEFFREY BROWN: Excuse me, but the — the technology — the unexpected happened. And so the question that you keep hearing over and over again is, why wasn’t there a plan for a worst-case scenario, which appears to have happened?

ROBERT DUDLEY: Blowout preventers are designed not to fail. They have connections with the rig that can close them. When there’s a disconnection with the rig, they close, and they’re also designed to be able to manually go down with robots and intervene and close them. Those three steps, for whatever reason, failed in this case. It’s unprecedented. We need to understand why and how that happened.

The failsafe failed. It always does. “Designed not to fail” can never mean “certain not to fail.” There is no such thing as “failsafe” — just different degrees of risk management, different choices about how much money to spend to reduce the likelihood of disaster, which can never entirely be eliminated.

Two different social attitudes conspire to lead us to disasters like the Gulf spill. On the one hand, there is the understandable but naive demand on the part of the public and its proxies in the media for certainty: How can we be sure that this never happens again? Sorry, we can’t. If we want to drill for oil we should assume that there will be spills. If we don’t like spills, we should figure out other ways to supply our energy.

On the other side, there is what I’d call the arrogance of the engineering mindset: the willingness to push limits — to drill deeper, to dam higher — with a certain reckless confidence that our imperfect minds and hands can handle whatever failures they cause.

Put these two together and you have, rather than any sort of “failsafe,” a dynamic of guaranteed failure. The public demands the impossibility of “failsafe” systems; the engineers claim to provide them; and everything is great until the inevitable failure. Each new failure inspires the engineers to redouble their efforts to achieve the elusive failsafe solution, which lulls the public into thinking that there will never be another disaster, until there is.

I wrote about these issues as they relate to software in Dreaming in Code. But at some point the need to understand this cycle demands a more artistic response.

May I suggest you give a listen to Frank Black’s “St. Francis Dam Disaster,” a great modern folksong about a colossal engineering failure of a different era.

No more bouncers at the journalism club door

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[I’m posting a lightly edited text of the talk I gave Friday at Stanford Law School’s “Future of Journalism: Unpacking the Rhetoric” conference. As you will see, I took seriously the concept of unpacking the rhetoric, and tried to answer the questions on the event’s agenda.]

I’ve been asked to defend the tenet “We are all journalists now.” But there are so many questions in those five words!

Who is we? What is a journalist? When is now? And, most importantly, for those of you whose memories extend back to the Clinton administration, what is the meaning of is — or in this case, “are”?

We aren’t all journalists now. My wonderful parents? they’re not journalists. They have a computer that’s connected to the Internet. But they’re not journalists. My ten-year-old twins? They aren’t, either. Not yet, anyway.

Am I? I’ve been a writer for 30 years. Worked for a newspaper for 10, a web magazine for another 10. But I never went to journalism school. Never been a member of SPJ or any other professional organization.

So I’m not happy with “we are all journalists now.” Let’s give it an edit. Let’s change it to “Now, anyone can do journalism.”

So what have I done here? First, I’ve moved from focusing on the role, the label, the professional imprimatur of the word “journalist,” to the verb, the activity, the pursuit. I’ve switched from talking about an individual’s identification with a professional label to pointing our attention to an activity.

Second: I’ve changed the statement from one about static definitions of states of being to one about the potential for participation.

We’re still going to have to address the fact that the “we” in the first version and the “anyone” in the second still ignore those reaches of our society and world where the tools of the Internet remain either inaccessible or unfamiliar. So we probably need to do one more tweak of the wording, maybe to “Now, anyone who’s online can do journalism” — or “Now, anyone on the network can do journalism.”

Now these are tenets I can get behind.

Still, we’re left this term “doing journalism.” What are we talking about here?

Here’s my take: You’re doing journalism when you’re delivering an accurate and timely account of some event to some public.

[Read more…]