Over the weekend many news organizations reported, erroneously, that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was dead. These reports don’t seem to have originated on Twitter. But many spread there — and now they’re occasioning a round of head-scratching over how to handle retractions and corrections in this new communications format.

This happens with every new phase of communications-technology evolution. Twitter, with its speed and popularity and intermingling of professional and personal channels, presents some modest new challenges to accuracy practices. But for journalists there should be little confusion about the answers.

At Lost Remote, Steve Safran writes:

We ask: is deleting a tweet after the fact a lack of transparency, especially if any subsequent tweets don’t admit the error? Is a news organization obliged to tweet that it was wrong? Does the retweet function make such actions moot? We strongly believe in transparency, as do many of you. But whether deleting tweets is a responsibility or not, and whether a news organization must tweet that it was wrong, should lead to serious discussions in all newsrooms.

For a private individual using Twitter, it might make sense to delete a message that you later discovered was in error. But for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated — sometimes called “scrubbing” — always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened.

The folks at WBUR have it just right:

We have decided NOT to delete the erroneous tweet, because it serves as part of the narrative of this story. Facts can change fast when news is breaking, and that leads to errors. We need to own the error, not hide from it. But we also need to rectify the error and explain ourselves to people who trust us. Deleting the tweet would do more to harm trust than preserving it would do to harm truth.

According to the chief argument in favor of tweet-deletion, if you leave a bad report lying around your feed, you’re tempting others to retweet it; if you delete, you’ll inhibit this viral repetition of misinformation. That’s a reasonable position. But there are alternatives to simply zapping the bad tweet and scrubbing the record.

The same technologies that force these problems on us can also help us solve them. On the Web, for instance, publishers can use versioning tools to keep a corrected edition of a story front and center while maintaining a trail of accountability. Similarly, Twitter users can use Twitter itself to correct the record while preserving it.

For instance: say your newsroom had sent out a tweet that read, as NPR’s did:

BREAKING: Rep. Giffords (D-AZ), 6 others killed by gunman in Tucson

You could send out a followup message, preserving a record of the error while correcting it:

CORRECTION Giffords wounded, in critical condition RT @NPR BREAKING: Rep. Giffords (D-AZ), 6 others killed by gunman in Tucson

Then you could reasonably go back and delete the original. This might be a useful tactic to curtail the spread of bad info. But it still flattens the record a bit, since the original message’s timestamp (and possibly other contextual data) would vanish.

Better yet is the idea floated by “Being Wrong” author Kathryn Schulz (@wrongologist) in this Poynter interview by Mallary Jean Tenore: “Why not have a ‘correct’ function (like the ‘reply’ and ‘retweet’ functions) that would automatically send a correction to everyone who had retweeted something that contained an error?”

Such a tool would dragoon the engine of viral misinformation back into the service of truth. You can say, “Hey, it’s just Twitter, what’s the big deal,” but experience suggests that arguments about Internet tools that begin with “It’s just” will get disproved over time. Twitter is beginning to mature into the rapid-response nervous system of our news world. It needs and ought to have a function like the one Schulz proposes.

BONUS LINK: Craig Silverman has a valuable roundup of links relating to errors in Tucson shooting coverage.

[I’ve continued discussing this topic in a followup post.]

The biennial midterm in American politics is almost always a time of turnover in presidential administrations. Appointees may be out of favor, or frustrated, or tired, or just eager to make some money; they leave. Elections that deliver a drubbing to the administration’s party, like our most recent one, make this sort of change even more likely.

All of which means there’s nothing too surprising or tumultuous about White House personnel change on the scale that we’re seeing this week — with the departures of President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs and political adviser David Axelrod, both of whom will continue to work on behalf of the president but from a greater distance, and the appointment of a new chief of staff and chief economic adviser. As Marc Ambinder wrote at the National Journal, the changes leave the president with “a different — but strangely familiar — cast of advisers, some playing new roles.”

So is this the big White House shake-up the Wall Street Journal promised us two months ago?

On the eve of the election, a Journal story offered dire warnings of just such an event, leaving a distinct impression of drawn knives and imminent bloodletting. Soon after, a MediaBugs error report raised a big red flag over the piece.

Here was the gist of the Journal piece: “Some high-level Democrats are calling for President Barack Obama to remake his inner circle or even fire top advisers in response to what many party strategists expect to be a decisive defeat on Tuesday.” A perfectly plausible notion. But, as our bug filer pointed out, the Journal offered not a single actual high-level Democrat — named or otherwise — calling on Obama to fire anyone.

Usually, when an inside-the-Beltway story reports a looming event without any evidence, the explanation is that some political insider has leaked the information on background. It’s then up to reporters and editors to decide whether the leak is a real story that readers deserve to hear about (usually, this means finding confirming sources), or a self-serving maneuver on the part of the leaker. In other words, is the scoop real, or is the press being manipulated?

Unfortunately, all the incentives in our current media environment push the newsroom to publish the rumor either way. Doing so seizes attention and stirs discussion. If it turns out to be a real story, great; if it turns out to be part of some manipulative corridors-of-power kabuki, well, so what? Your news organization will rarely pay a price for donning a mask and assuming a role in that shadow play. The world will forget and move on.

In this case, if Obama, fast on the heels of the election, had announced an administration-insiders’ bloodbath, firing people like Axelrod and confidante Valerie Jarrett, then the Journal could credibly say, “See? We got the story right. Sorry we couldn’t tell you how at the time!” Media critics might still bridle at the story’s technique, but the newspaper could reasonably argue that the public interest was served.

But the shake-up never materialized. There was no chorus of Democratic party establishment types demanding one. Instead, there’s just been some standard-issue midterm turnover — which the Journal, like other news organizations, has covered without reference to its previous story. And we’ll never know who, exactly, was trying to serve what purpose in the days before the election of spreading a portrait of infighting in the West Wing.

After some effort on MediaBugs’ part, we received a response from the Journal’s assistant managing editor to the MediaBugs report. She disputed its premise, maintaining that the story was “solid and complete.” That’s where the issue stands; we’ve closed the bug out (as we do after two months) as “unresolved.”

MediaBugs itself doesn’t offer a ruling on “who’s right.” If you’re interested, you can go read the Journal story, read the bug report, and decide for yourself.

This process may not provide satisfaction to the critics of a media report or vindication for the journalists involved. But it does leave what I think is a useful and valuable public record of the disagreement, more organized and authoritative than a simple blog post. Over time, a repository of such records might restore some accountability for misconceived stories — and even begin to reverse the tide of public distrust in the media.

Our Report an Error Alliance has won a couple of great endorsements. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard has recommended that NPR implement a Report an Error button. And at the NewsFoo conference last weekend in Phoenix, a by-invitation gathering of journalists and digital innovators, Tim O’Reilly told people that Report an Error was “the most important thing” he’d seen at the event. (Grin!)

At NewsFoo, I got the chance to talk about both MediaBugs and Report an Error. I did also hear some thoughtful criticisms of the Report an Error effort, and I’d like to record them here and respond to them. (I’ll do my best to present these perspectives fairly, but I’m working from memory and paraphrasing.)

(1) The messaging is off. One participant felt that the whole “Report an Error” button concept gets the conversation between a media outlet and a reader off on the wrong foot. Why would a media outlet want to open the discussion by saying, “Tell me what I did wrong?” Why would a publisher put a big red-and-black “X” on the page?

Well, the icon is only big on our Report an Error Alliance home page — on most news pages, it will be as tiny as a “print” or “share” icon, and we have monochrome versions of it for anyone who finds the red-and-black scheme a turnoff. (I kinda like it, but of course it’s a matter of taste.)

More importantly, here’s why we chose to go with “report an error” rather than something vaguer like “send feedback” or “tell us how we’re doing”: “Report an error” is blunt and specific — and we believe that’s good! It says, forthrightly, “We know we make mistakes, and we definitely want to hear about them.” Most sites already have general feedback channels of various kinds, and of course the majority of sites today have comments, too. Yet error reports offered through these channels frequently languish unanswered.

Maybe it’s a little idealistic to propose that news sites give an interface feature a name that is direct rather than euphemistic. But maybe it’s just good pragmatic design. And publications from the Toronto Star to the Huffington Post (which labels its link “Report corrections”) have already agreed.

(2) It’s just more overload. According to this criticism, news sites that are already doing a good job listening to their readers’ feedback through existing channels don’t need to add a new one. And those sites that already feel overwhelmed by the channels they have won’t do any better by adding one more.

I’m sure there’s some truth to this argument. Handling feedback well isn’t just a site design or interface issue, it’s a management skill.

But I still think there’s value in prioritizing readers’ error reports over more general feedback. I can envision plenty of cases where editors who are trying to make their organizations more responsive might find it helpful to be able to signal their staff and their audience that error reports get special treatment.

Using a “report an error” button is a way of telling the public, “Sure, we want to know what you think. But if you think we made a mistake we really want to know it, fast.” At the same time, the buttons tell the news staff that these reports matter more than random gripes and drive-by comments, and deserve considered responses.

(3) Readers will bombard us with general comments. An editor at one of our leading national newspapers said that he’d be concerned about adding “report an error” buttons because seven out of ten messages wouldn’t be reports about specific factual errors but more general complaints along the lines of “you got the whole thing wrong” — to which his staff would still have to respond.

As someone who managed a shrinking newsroom for five years, I have great empathy with this perspective. But I think there’s a way in which the dedicated “report an error” button can actually be a labor-saving device for resource-strapped newsroom managers.

Assuming that said managers actually want to see error reports — if they don’t, this whole discussion is moot — then surely it’s an easier matter to sift the specific reports from more general complaints than to try to fish them out of an even noisier and lengthier comments section. And of course a publication could always choose to put a MediaBugs widget behind the Report an Error button (as I do here on this blog) — in which case our moderation of bug reports at MediaBugs can help with the filtering.

As for the need to respond to this onslaught: Yes, it’s a burden. But it’s also an opportunity to re-engineer the newsroom’s relationship with its readers, to engage with the public on matters of substance, and to begin to restore some trust in the product of journalism. Surely that’s worth the effort.

Today, you can pretty much assume that any online news story or blog post will come with a bevy of buttons to share it, print it, send it to your mobile device, and so on.

But what about when you want to correct it? Isn’t this kind of important? Shouldn’t there be a button for that?

Well, now there is. Today Craig Silverman (of Regret the Error) and I are unveiling a new project called The Report an Error Alliance. Our goal is simple: to promote a new standard to enable error reporting about news content on the Web.

We believe that every page of news content that gets published should provide a Report an Error button — an easy-to-find and easy-to-use tool that readers can use to tell the publishing site that they believe it got something wrong.

We’re not trying to dictate how each site uses these buttons: they can link to a site’s contact form, or provide a simple email link, or use the MediaBugs widget or something like it. That’s up to each news organization or site to choose. What’s important is that the button be handy, right by the story, not buried deep in a sea of footer links or three layers down a page hierarchy.

We’ve got a handful of forward-thinking Web news outfits signed on already — including the Toronto Star, TBD.com, Salon.com, Poynter.org, and NewsTrust.net. We hope to see this roster grow. We also encourage individuals to add their names to our alliance as an indication of your support for this new standard.

Many of you already know about my work on MediaBugs; Report an Error is related but independent of that. It’s meant to be a focused effort toward a simple goal. While the Web has enabled powerful two-way communication between journalists and their publics for a decade-and-a-half, too many news sites still make it hard for you to tell them they made a mistake. Such reports get buried in voice-mail boxes and lost in flame-infested comment threads. Yet journalists still need to hear them, and readers deserve to know that they’ve been heard.

Implementing a “report an error” button isn’t by itself a magic solution to the problem of accuracy and the erosion of confidence in the media. But it’s a good start at repairing the growing rift between the press and the public. It’s like putting a badge on everything you publish that says, “If you see a problem, we really want to know about it!”

So visit our Report an Error site, join the Alliance yourself, and grab some of our icons to use on your news pages and posts. You can see one just below these words right here.

UPDATE: You can also read Craig Silverman’s post about the Report an Error Alliance at Regret the Error.

When I talk about the state of corrections in today’s news media I use the phrase “circle the wagons” a lot. It’s meant to evoke the defensive reflexes that kick in when a news organization perceives it’s under attack. Too often, circling the wagons is the default reaction in the newsroom when readers raise questions about coverage.

The advantage of the circle-the-wagons response is that it buttresses the institutional facade of authority, and these buttresses hold up well as long as the reader lacks the time or interest to pay close attention. The disadvantage of the circle-the-wagons response is that it is prone to crumble when the reader looks too closely.

In this post, I am going to look very closely at one such incident. So be warned: we’re heading deep into some weeds.

Last week MediaBugs received an error report about an election-eve story in the Wall Street Journal. The story’s headline announced “Pressure Builds on Obama to Shake Up Inner Circle,” but, our error reporter pointed out, the article failed to provide any quotes of actual people urging Obama to shake up his inner circle. We sought a response from the Journal, and when we didn’t get one, we made a little noise about it.

MediaBugs finally got a response from the Journal Thursday. I would characterize it as a circle-the-wagons response, and I’m going to dissect it and the story it references to see what we can learn.

[Read more…]

Earlier this week I was reading the NY Times’ Media Decoder post about my friend and former colleague Joan Walsh’s announcement that she was stepping down as Salon’s editor to write a book. (The estimable Kerry Lauerman replaces her.)

So I’m reading along, and I see that her new book is going to be titled Indecisive:

Hmm. Joan’s a pretty smart editor and writer, and somehow Indecisive is just not the kind of book title I would expect her to end up with. Doesn’t exactly grab you by the lapels.

A little later I saw a message from Joan on Twitter reporting that, indeed, the Times report was wrong — the title of her book, which is going to be about how the politics of fear are hurting the U.S., is, in fact, Indivisible. Which makes much more sense: it’s pleasantly allusive and clearly related to the subject matter.

Several hours later, the Times blog post had been revised to reflect the correct title:

But this change has occurred without any notice whatsoever on the copy.

There are two ways of viewing this practice. One is, who cares? It’s the Web, you can change stuff any time you like. Why shouldn’t the Times go ahead and use this malleable medium in a malleable way?

The other is to say that we’re now practicing journalism in an environment that lets us change text at will, and as a result, we need to be extra careful about maintaining accountability for what we post.

Looser practices in this area, like Slate’s now-closed 24-hour “window” for making changes to stories, remain common. The Times itself appears to have chosen a variation of this approach, one that sounds arbitrary and inconsistent as articulated last month by associate managing editor Jim Roberts:

Particularly in the realm of breaking news (but also in the realm of features, enterprise projects, and in this case, advance obits), we are constantly refining what we publish online. Articles grow as we learn more information, and sometimes change direction if the news dictates. Often what gets into the printed paper (where space is much more finite) is a tighter edit on what we publish online.

… Because our editing and publishing systems for print and the Web are intertwined, we often (but not always) use the final printed version as the final archived version that stays on the Web, the theory being that this version of the story has all the accumulated wisdom of our editing process in place. There are many exceptions to this, particularly developing news stories that continue to be updated through the night, well beyond the deadline of the print edition.

In other words, as Roberts explains it, each story the Times posts on the Web is an “iterative” work-in-progress, undergoing a process of “constant refinement” until it congeals into a (sort of) final form for print — but said form can still keep changing, too. So the Times-on-the-Web is always subject to change, and there appears to be no clear line separating “changes that require a correction” from those that don’t that editors can draw and readers can understand. (Compare the Times’ handling of the Walsh error to the humble Galleycat publishing blog, which saw fit to put a correction line on its updated post.)

I predict this policy will last only until the next major blow-up, when readers call foul after observing some particularly sensitive Times story get “refined” in an unaccountable manner, and Times editors wake up to the reality that this policy undermines their own traditions of paper-of-record accountability.

The answer is plain, as I’ve been arguing for some time now: The Times and other papers should preserve their freedom to improve stories while simultaneously retaining their readers’ trust by exposing the “history” of revisions to every story they publish. This can be done in a manner that’s unobtrusive. Once it’s coded into the publishing platform, it requires zero additional work on the part of editors and reporters. It just makes sense.

And here’s why it’s important: When your publishing tools let you change posted content without leaving a trail, and your publishing culture doesn’t strictly limit or control journalists’ ability to make those changes, they will be tempted, sooner or later, to try to hide substantial and important mistakes. This is only human. No newsroom — even one as careful as the Times — can assume that its denizens are exempt. The solution is obvious: deliver writers from temptation, and track changes for readers.