Tag Archives: accuracy

So you found something wrong on the internet? No worries. Just fix it.

I do sometimes find it tiresome hearing the same old refrains about the internet: 'oh, but it's full of rubbish', 'but there's some terrible misinformation online', 'yes but who has time for all this?' Clearly I'm not alone. Jeff Jarvis does a good job collating some of his standard rebuttals: There’s junk on the internet. True. There’s junk everywhere (even on bookshop shelves). The mistake is to think that the internet should be packaged and perfected, like media. It’s not media. Blogger Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, says the web is instead a place where we talk and connect.
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Mistakes are built into the system

I've had a few interesting conversations this week about quality control in newsrooms, in part sparked by the diagram I posted last week showing how many pairs of hands various kinds of news stories go through before being published. One thing that came up was how irritated people are by the number of typos regularly seen on news websites - including nzherald.co.nz and stuff.co.nz. As Nathan said in a recent comment, "I generally expect better of professionals."
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How did Malcolm become Michael overnight?

There I was yesterday, banging on in a lecture to journalism students about sub-editing. Specifically, about the importance of checking facts and figures in stories and getting names, dates and places right. Small mistakes can have a disproportionately large effect on a reader's trust in a news organisation, said I. And what did I see on the front page of the Herald this morning? A story about the Vatican's revamp of the seven deadly sins attributed to a reporter called Michael Moore. But it wasn't by Michael at all, but by Malcolm Moore, the Telegraph's Rome-based correspondent.
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A minimise-your-legal-risk blog list

Via Jeff Jarvis, here's a top 10 list of advice from Knight Citizen News Network on how to blog without blowing it. All common sense.
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Dear BBC, thanks for letting me help

Wow. That was quick. I noticed a typo earlier on a BBC story and decided to see if they had a way for readers to contact them about howlers. I found one and sent in the typos. Sure enough, 5 minutes later when I checked the story again, the changes had been made
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