Everyone makes mistakes. To be credible you have to fess up when you get things wrong. Doing so doesn’t make you look bad. It shows you care about the truth.
Two photos of birds. The left one is a curlew sandpiper and is covered by a big red X. The other is a Eurasian curlew and is covered by a red check mark. (Illustration by News Decoder)
In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip, News Decoder’s Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner explains how journalists should correct their mistakes.
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It feels great as a journalist when a story you write gets published. But that great feeling disappears when someone writes or calls to tell you that something in the story was wrong.
You check and when you find out they are right and you made a mistake, you have to publish a correction.
We all make mistakes. You remember hearing something on a podcast and tell a friend, but you get the country wrong or the decade wrong or the politician wrong. Our memories trip us up. I have friends and family who are chronic mistake makers in stories they tell.
The difference in journalism is that when you discover you made a mistake you then have to announce that to the world. We call that “issuing a correction.” It means that somewhere on the page you clearly state that a mistake had been made and corrected. Best practice calls for explaining to readers what the error was.
When you find out that something you reported is wrong, the initial tendency is to ignore it and hope that no one else noticed the error. But any reputable journalist quells that impulse.
Credibility is everything.
Correcting a mistake properly is the mark of a good journalist. It means that the person cares about accuracy and truth and will bear a little humiliation to make sure the information they give their readers and listeners can be trusted.
To get a sense of this, check out the corrections pages of The New York Times or The Guardian.
On 18 June, the Times corrected a story about the U.S. professional basketball team the Oklahoma City Thunder. The story had said that the population of Oklahoma City was 1.4 million, but that was the population of the city’s entire metro area. The population of Oklahoma City proper is just 700,000. Most readers wouldn’t care, but the Times felt compelled to issue that correction.
On 19 June, the Guardian corrected a mistake that had appeared in the caption of a photo in the print version of a story about textile waste in Ghana. The mistake was identifying a bird in the photo as a curlew sandpiper when it was really a Eurasian curlew, as any birder would know.
Here is the thing — people love to correct journalists. When I was just out of university, I realized that a New York Times story about Hong Kong misstated the population of the city by millions. I took great pleasure in notifying them and seeing the correction the next day.
Mistakes happen.
These types of mistakes are easy to make. In the case of the Hong Kong story it was the inadvertent addition of an extra digit so 5 million became 15 million.
Most people don’t realize how difficult journalism is. First, the reporter has to get people to talk to them, or they have to read through long tedious documents that would put anyone to sleep. Then, they have to figure out how to tell a story based on that so it won’t cause readers or listeners to snooze. And finally, they have to make sure that everything that goes into that story is accurate, including the spelling of people’s names — and some people’s names are really hard to spell. It is a painstaking process.
It would be a miracle if mistakes were never made. The reality is that journalists as a whole make mistakes all the time. Even the best journalists make mistakes. But if you are good at what you do and are painstaking in your reporting and delivery, your mistakes are infrequent and minor.
But if you are a credible journalist you will correct even the most minor of mistakes. Someone owned two pet rabbits, not one? You issue a correction. It was the Elk River in Humboldt County, California, not the nearby Eel River? You correct it.
Don’t just change the copy online. Put a note somewhere on the page that tells readers the story has been corrected. Now, some organizations believe that you shouldn’t repeat the mistake and it can be a bit tricky issuing the correction without doing that. Others give you the exact original wording and tell you how it was wrong. Some publications tell you how the mistake was made.
When the error is minor
You don’t have to correct all mistakes. Few publications will issue a correction when they fix a minor typo or the misspelling of someone’s name.
How exact or extensive the correction is up to the publication or sometimes the reporter or editor. If you are publishing your work on your own site, it is up to you.
The Poynter Institute, which is a professional development organization for journalists, has some tips for how to handle corrections.
The important thing is to know everyone makes mistakes. And while it can be a mortifying experience to tell the world you made one, you build credibility by doing so.
Isn’t that correct?
Questions to consider:
1. What does it mean for a journalist to issue a correction?
2. Why kinds of mistakes do not require the issuing of a correction?
3. Why does issuing a correction help a journalist establish credibility?
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book "Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication."
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