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Slate.com recently reported on a University of Oregon study that found “fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.”

2 PERCENT!

And even more interesting:

About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.

Why won’t news orgs correct the errors?

When I worked for a newspaper in Washington, D.C., I misnamed a program offered by a financial advocacy group. The next day we ran a correction on page 2, and the advocacy group called me again, finding another mistake. The paper then ran another correction the following day. Two corrections on an article of little importance. My editors weren’t pleased, but more annoyed than angry with me.

From this experience, I learned that it’s not that newspaper people don’t want to correct mistakes. But the news doesn’t stop for a day old story. Newspaper people are already moving on to the next story, and if the offending story doesn’t have much impact anyway, giving it a correction is more of an annoyance than anything else.

Why journalists should care about errors

I don’t remember all of the stories I wrote during my time in print. But I will say, it’s very likely that my sources remember seeing their name in the newspaper. (Image by futureatlas.com)

People care when they see their name in print! People clip the pages and paste the clippings in scrapbooks, so they can show their relatives and remember during their old days when they were famous for a day.

But imagine if your only memory is when they spelled your name wrong. Or the newspaper misquoted you or got the facts wrong about which Tom Gabe in St. Louis held up the liquor store. Most likely, you wouldn’t have a good impression of the news organization and you may boycott the media company for the error.

And if boycotting isn’t enough, you may tell others about how the newspaper didn’t get your information right. And that story will spread, leading to more people losing trust in the news org. Getting the facts wrong and upsetting sources can lead to a snowball effect of losing trust in your organization.

So give copy editors a blog and put fixes online!

I’m sure errors happen all the time. Why not give the copy desk a blog and let them provide corrections. News orgs could even put a homepage promo up directly linking to corrections.

Often corrections are relegated to a small section on page 2 or deeper into the paper. Most people won’t see them anyway. Save the print space by just giving nuggets of info about the corrections that are explained in complete detail online.

Drive people to your web site and promote the corrections on the web site. Let more people see them and show that your news org really prides itself on getting the story right.

And even more, encourage people to comment on the mistakes and make suggestions. Help readers feel like they are a part of the paper.

What do you think? Can online corrections blogs help news orgs’ credibility? Should news orgs give more detail about their mistakes online, where people can comment on the mistakes??