You laughed at the correction we posted yesterday, but now we have the full story. The author of the New York Times article, Amy Harmon, explained how it all came about.
She tells how the error came to the newspaper's attention, how important it turned out to be in the context of the article, and her explanation for it. Link -via Metafilter
The Times’ rule is, we correct anything that is wrong, no matter how small or seemingly silly. And I don’t know any of my colleagues who would want to do differently. I hate to get any detail wrong, and when I do, I often have a moment of fantasizing about just letting it slip. But as I sat there that morning, kicking myself for a relatively small mistake that marred a story I had poured my heart into, it seemed so much worse to let it stand. Not correcting it would have undermined the credibility of the other 5,011 words of the story – at least for “My Little Pony” fans. And I think we have seen now that they are not an obsessive subculture to be taken lightly.
Another part of the Times’ corrections policy, which arose after the awfulness of Jayson Blair, is that each correction is entered in a tracking system that includes who was responsible, and an explanation of how the error came to be.
She tells how the error came to the newspaper's attention, how important it turned out to be in the context of the article, and her explanation for it. Link -via Metafilter
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Yeah, corrections are good. Corrections made with the same prominence as the original story are better. The longstanding newspaper tradition is to print the incorrect story prominently and then bury the corrections in some back corner of the paper.
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