The ‘best description’ of a newspaper is an even better fit for online news
I full intended this post to focus on
The entire column in Howell’s response to what was said and done at the
Readers have many independent ways to verify a newspaper’s version of what happened, he [keynote speaker
Allan Rusbridger ] “There are millions of fact checkers out there . . . and some . . . know far more than we do . . . So we can refuse systematically to correct or clarify our journalism, but we would be foolish to imagine that it will therefore go uncorrected or unclarified. It will: All that will happen is that it will take place elsewhere.”
Yep.
Then he quoted a speech Post columnist David S. Broder made 30 years ago: “I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been made . . . that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours . . . distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you . . . to read it in about an hour. If we labeled the paper accurately then we would immediately add: But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected, updated version.”
Well, that isn’t also a description of online news, but more so.
“It still strikes me” Rusbridger said, “as the best description of what a newspaper is. And is, even more so today. The greater the speed required of us in the digital world — and speed does matter, but never at the expense of accuracy or fairness or anything which would imperil trust — the more we should be honest about the tentative nature of what is possible.”
Perhaps I am a little hypersensitive to mainstream media snobbery, is this guy saying that honest mistakes are forgivable if they are corrected in the next day’s paper, but that mistakes made online are less so because accuracy and fairness are too important, even in a digital world?
Here’s something he ought to consider: A mistake made in print lives forever. Reporters often keep repeating the same misspellings and other wrong information because they consult their own clips and files, instead of their newspaper’s libraries, which SHOULD attach all corrections to original stories as a matter of policy. And readers/sources often clip stories for their own records and might miss that correction than ran on the inside of the paper somewhere.
I keep hearing that mistakes made online are equally permanent. No. Not hardly.
An online news article can be fixed instantaneously. And while search engines like Google saved cached versions of Websites, this doesn’t happen instantaneously. And even is a cashed version exists that includes an error, most people use these only when the original article vanishes, which happens only when the article is removed, perhaps inside a paid archives system like the one the Journal Star so unwisely uses. And also, Google will remove a cached page upon request.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
You just want online so you don’t have to pay for it. If the Washington Post or the PJS made you pay for their online news, you wouldn’t read it either. Stop complaining and pay the buck to get the paper. The reason online news isn’t doing as well as you want is that people don’t know how to make money off it. I know your site is raking in the bucks but others aren’t. Stop griping.