Last week I was glad to see Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times’ public editor, call for the paper to post all its policies and standards for news out on its website where everyone can see them. I hope your first thought hearing this matches mine: “You mean they don’t already?”

Brisbane’s column only reminds us how stubbornly most news organizations still cling to their opacity. The Times is relatively forward-thinking about corrections policies, but for it, as for most of our news institutions, public accountability remains more of an aspiration than a way of life.

I agree with Jay Rosen that Brisbane’s suggestion, if implemented, would mark a “major step forward in transparency.” Still, my cheers for Brisbane’s column were muted a bit by its clumsy framing of the challenges the Times and its peers face as they set out to open themselves to public scrutiny.

Brisbane seems to be under the impression that posting a set of policies presents the Times with difficult technical challenges. In reality, the technical and design issues here are nonexistent — posting a bunch of static web pages shouldn’t take the Times staff more than a few days, if not hours. The problems, rather, are organizational: Most institutions are reluctant to expose their inner workings to sunlight. Newsrooms are no different — but they should be. They exist to inform the public and hold powerful people and institutions accountable. They should set an example for those they cover, not just to avoid hypocrisy but also to earn back some of the public trust they’ve lost.

Here is the heart of Brisbane’s proposal:

The Times should step out ahead of its industry peers by creating a reader-friendly portal to its policies on ethics, style and usage, blogging, anonymous sources, social networking and other subjects that readers and journalists care about. I envision a link on the left side of the NYTimes.com home page that would take you to a Journalism Policies page where you could locate topics using a search tool.

A link! A page! Topics that are searchable! There isn’t a content management system in use today that doesn’t make providing such material a snap. The Times probably employs several. Yet Brisbane goes on to assert that “building the portal would require considerable programming time.” Really, it should take zero programming time, a tiny bit of a designer’s time, and a modest amount of editorial time to prepare and organizes the policy pages. That’s it.

The real cost to the organization would lie in the long meetings where editors would have to hash out whether they can really commit, in public, to every avowal of each existing policy. Once you publish detailed policies, as Brisbane points out, you face inevitable “headaches” as the online public begins to compare the paper’s stated policies with its daily practices.

Well, get out the Tylenol. These are the very same headaches that good journalists visit every day on public officials, businesspeople, and everyone else they write about. Goose, meet gander.

By all means, let the Times and its competitors follow Brisbane’s suggestion. But his “policy portal” is a bare minimum, a catch-up-to-the-present move. It’s a small down-payment on the kind of real transparency that we have every right to expect newsrooms to epitomize. News providers should go way beyond spelling out their policies for the public; they should unveil as much of their actual practices and processes as they reasonably can.

One of the tenets of MediaBugs is that there’s value in providing a public, permanent space for discussion and debate about potential errors in news coverage — illuminating a process that has traditionally taken place in the dark. As Brisbane says, this sort of thing provides dividends in trust that journalists today desperately need. It also actively improves the coverage journalists can provide, which should be more than enough reason to do it.

In his latest Sunday column, New York Times editor Bill Keller tries to lay out the Times’ ideals — as distinct from the work of “guerrilla” newsies like Julian Assange and James O’Keefe. Keller’s credo: Verification beats assertion! Correct errors quickly and forthrightly! Who’d argue?

Anyone can embrace these principles; the devil’s in applying them. Of our major news institutions, the Times leads the pack today when it comes to correcting its goofs. It is, I think, the last of our media outlets to accept that the burden of “paper of record” authority means an endless parade of corrections.

But the juxtaposition this weekend of Keller’s self-defense with a particularly glaring Times misstep leaves me with some unsettling questions.

Writing on his Shanghai Scrap blog last week, China-based journalist Adam Minter took apart the Times’ Monday story about electronic censorship in China. The story led with a funny anecdote about cellphone calls in China getting cut off by government censors whenever they utter the word “protest” — even if they’re quoting Shakespeare’s “lady doth protest too much.” The rest of the piece wasn’t about cell-phone monitoring at all, but rather describes a recent tightening of Chinese Internet censorship.

Minter thought the “protest” thing sounded fishy, so he performed an impromptu field-test. He was unable to duplicate the censors’ call cutoff, using three different phrases including “protest”, uttered in succession twice during cell calls to five different recipients in China.

That’s just “anecdata,” sure. But so was the Times’ tale — and if it doesn’t pass this basic sniff test, it shouldn’t be in the paper.

But the story gets messier. On Thursday Minter found a comment on his blog from Jonathan Ansfield, a Times contributor in the Beijing bureau who was listed as one of the story’s contributors. “For the record,” Ansfield wrote, “the contributing reporter’s own tests comport with yours. regrettably his input on the story made little difference.”

Whoa! This doesn’t sound good.

By this morning, the Times had appended an Editor’s Note to the story, explaining that it had failed to mention that the dropped-call anecdotes happened at the Times’ own bureau:

The article did not point out that in both cases, the recipients of the calls were in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. Because scrutiny of press communications could easily be higher than for those of the public at large, the calls could not be assumed to represent a broader trend; therefore, those examples should not have been given such prominence in the article.

So the Times gets one cheer for dealing with this at all, and dealing with it quickly. But, given the evident breakdown in the editorial process, it also leaves us with a bunch of further questions. We still don’t know exactly what went awry here: How did a solid and important account of Internet censorship get saddled with a misconceived intro about cellphone surveillance — one that not only “should not have been given such prominence” but probably shouldn’t have been published at all? How did the Times’ editorial process override the evident objections of its reporter on the scene?

This is where defenders of the traditional newsroom circle-the-wagons practice pipe up in protest: “What do you guys want? We can’t do our work under a spotlight! Should every editorial argument be aired in public?”

And this is also where reasonable advocates of transparency respond, “Of course not. Not when the system works fine. But when there’s a problem, you owe it to your readers to tell them the whole story of what happened, just as your own reporters would try to tell the whole story of what happened in any other institution that erred.”

One problem is that our newsroom culture still drapes errors in shame instead of handling them as inevitable byproducts of an imperfect business. Keller’s column talks about “taking yourself to the woodshed,” which is, if I recall, the place where you get spanked, or worse.

The Times’ opaque Editor’s Note non-explanation is a symptom of a kind of defensiveness that infects most of our news institutions. Yes, we will correct our errors, say our editors. But first, they insist, prove to us we were wrong! Then, and only then, we’ll grudgingly admit it while doing our best to minimize it. But don’t expect us to tell you the whole story of the process that led to the error — unless it was so scandalous (see: Jayson Blair; Iraq WMD) that we feel we have no choice.

This defensiveness is inevitable; it comes with our humanity. That’s why journalists committed to verification and accuracy need to bend over backwards to counter it.

Keller makes this argument himself in his effort to explain why he considers the “impartiality” of Times reporters to be such an immovable principle. He writes, “Once you proclaim an opinion, you may feel an urge to defend it, and that creates a temptation to overlook inconvenient facts when you should be searching them out.” This is certainly true — and it is why the best opinion columnists make a point of seeking out the the most inconvenient facts and the strongest opposing arguments.

What Keller doesn’t seem to see is that the logic he applies to opinion also holds for fact. Once a news organization proclaims a version of reality, its first instinct will always be to defend it. Trouble is, the defensiveness doesn’t protect the newsroom at all; it actually further undermines the public’s already shaky trust in the journalist’s work. The reader thinks: Why won’t they just tell us what happened? What are they trying to hide?

So now Bill Keller is writing a regular column, and he’s given us his journalistic credo of verification, impartiality and the “business of witness.” Wouldn’t it be great for him to apply those ideals in his own writing about the Times itself? What if Keller used his column to give us forthright, open explanations of how the Times runs off the rails in cases like this Beijing phone-call affair? In other words, not just an editor’s note — an editor’s story.

BONUS LINK: Felix Salmon takes Keller to the, uh, woodshed.

UPDATE: I missed the simple factual error in Keller’s original column, (James O’Keefe didn’t impersonate a Muslim NPR would-be donor, his confederates did). But John McQuaid caught it and filed an error report at MediaBugs. The Times corrected it Sunday afternoon. The paper has let stand a broader misrepresentation Keller made about the O’Keefe affair (NPR exec Shiller, it turns out, offered a derisive description of the GOP via a quote from disaffected Republicans — he wasn’t expressing his own opinion).

Beginning Monday, every new staff-written article on the Washington Post’s website came with a prominent link labeled “YOUR FEEDBACK: Corrections, suggestions?” One click takes the reader to a form for reporting errors or providing other feedback to the newsroom.

This makes the Post the first major U.S. news outlet to heed the call that MediaBugs, Craig Silverman and I made with the Report an Error Alliance, urging news sites to make this sort of link a standard feature, like the now-ubiquitous “share” and “print” links.

Actually, Post managing editor Raju Narisetti explained in an email that the new corrections link has been long planned as part of a broader content-management system upgrade. Conversations about corrections practices at NewsFoo, a digital news conference organized by O’Reilly in December (both Narisetti and I were there, along with Greg Linch, who recently joined the Post as a web producer), triggered more internal discussions at the Post.

When the software upgrade’s January launch got delayed, the Post decided to move forward with a pilot of the report-an-error feature sooner, using a Google Docs form to collect readers’ input. As Josh Young pointed out, this sort of nimble, “grab whatever tool’s handy” web development is typical at startups but less common at large media companies.

The newspaper recently took heat from departing ombudsman Andrew Alexander, who wrote that the paper had “become riddled with typos, grammatical mistakes and intolerable ‘small’ factual errors that erode credibility.”

In the Post’s blog post announcing the new feature, Narisetti said, “It addresses a chronic complaint that we don’t make it easy for our online audiences to engage with us on stories, whether it is about factual issues or other ways to get us to meet their needs.”

The Post is hardly the only major news outlet to hear this complaint. Our MediaBugs survey of correction practices across U.S. news sites chronicled a widespread pattern of obscurity and inaccessibility in this realm.

But don’t news sites have comments? And can’t readers just post there about errors?

In theory, yes. But in practice, on most news sites, the freewheeling debates and endless digressions of comment forums provide an inefficient channel for the public to get reporters’ and editors’ attention about mistakes and problems in stories. The urgent signal that “you got something wrong” gets buried in the noise.

A dedicated channel for corrections reports and substantive complaints can be a labor-saving device for newsroom managers — a means to solicit priceless intelligence from the readers who, collectively, as Dan Gillmor famously says, know more than any individual journalist does.

I asked Narisetti about reactions inside the Post and from the public.

“The newsroom response so far has been good,” Narisetti replied, “in the sense it helps streamline what was an ad hoc process online even as we have very evolved policies on this in print.” After one day, he said, the paper had received “about six” submissions; two were about points of fact, and one has already led to a correction.

“It’s early so premature to judge,” Narisetti added, “but the real goal is to make it easy for our audiences to engage with us.”

That’s a goal worth setting and working on. What media executives call “engagement” is closely related to what other companies call “customer service.” Whatever you call it, journalists aren’t always comfortable with it, but newsrooms desperately need more of it, and the Post deserves hearty applause for pursuing it.

Here are some suggestions for the Post to consider as it reviews this project and its practices evolve:

Use an icon. The Post places its “YOUR FEEDBACK” link fairly prominently, in a right-column inset. But it’s all text, and the reader’s fast-scanning eye doesn’t always locate it on first pass. (Several people who read an early mention of the feature on Twitter mentioned that they couldn’t find it on the page.) Some sort of icon or image would really help. The Report an Error Alliance has proposed one icon as a standard (it’s right at the bottom of this post!), and there’s an advantage to providing an image that users can recognize across many sites (like the RSS-feed icon). But we also know that most sites are picky about the look and feel of icons, and really, any icon is better than none.

Make the form even easier to use. For instance, right now the form requires the user to input the web address (URL) of the story page by hand. In the final version of the feature, I hope the Post will automatically fill in the URL when the reader clicks on the feedback link from a story. Each step that you can streamline for the user is worth taking.

Coordinate the new feedback loop with the old one. The Post site, like many newspaper sites, still displays a kind of split personality between the corrections policies and practices on the print side and those of the online newsroom. For instance, the “corrections” link at the bottom of every Post page points to a list of recent corrections and a block of instructions that appear to relate mostly to the print product. This gets confusing to readers, who don’t understand the organizational divisions behind such disconnections — and shouldn’t have to.

Make the whole process public. The ultimate purpose for a newsroom to open an error-reporting channel is to restore public trust in the process of verification underlying the news report. To earn maximum trust, the channel ought to be transparent: It should be clear to the public whether the news organization is responding appropriately to reasonable feedback. Placing those responses out in the open, in turn, can help defend the newsroom when it becomes the target of unfair or irresponsible critics. Such transparency creates a kind of bedrock of trust, and it’s one of the motivating principles behind MediaBugs. Whether a news organization partners with a neutral organization like ours or prefers to handle the process by itself, conducting the exchange openly keeps everyone more honest.

We know this all requires some new thinking, and maybe even a leap of faith, for many editors. It isn’t going to happen overnight. But we’re convinced it’s the future.

This post originally appeared on the PBS MediaShift IdeaLab blog.