The web is a two-way medium. But when it comes to reporting errors on news sites, too often, it might as well be broadcast or print.
It’s time to change that. That’s why, yesterday, we announced the launch of the Report an Error Alliance — an ad hoc coalition of news organizations and individuals who believe that every news page on the web ought to have a clearly labeled button for reporting errors.
Today’s articles come with their own array of buttons for sharing — and print and email and so on. We believe that opening a channel for readers to report errors is at least as important as any of those functions.
We aim to make the “report an error” button a new web standard. Toward that end, we’re releasing a set of icons that anyone can use for this purpose. It’s up to each publisher what to do with them — link them to a form or an email address, use a dedicated error-reporting service like MediaBugs, or choose any other option that suits your needs. What’s important is that the button be handy, right by the story, not buried deep in a sea of footer links or three layers down a page hierarchy.
We’ve got a handful of forward-thinking web news outfits signed on already — including the Toronto Star, TBD.com, Salon.com, Poynter.org, and NewsTrust.net. We hope to see this roster grow. We also encourage individuals to add their names to our alliance as an indication of your support for this new standard.
Kathy English, public editor at the Toronto Star, which already has its own “report an error” button, said, “I’m pleased that the Star is a founding member of this important initiative to help assure greater accuracy in digital journalism. The Star has long encouraged readers to report errors for correction, in print and online, where the ‘Report an Error’ function in effect turns every reader into a fact checker. This is a strong step forward in establishing industry best practices for online accuracy and corrections.”
Not a Magic Solution
Report an Error is intended to be a focused effort toward a simple goal. Too many news sites still make it hard for you to tell them they made a mistake. Such reports get buried in voice-mail boxes and lost in flame-infested comment threads. Yet journalists still need to hear them, and readers deserve to know that they’ve been heard.
Implementing a “report an error” button isn’t by itself a magic solution to the problem of accuracy and the erosion of confidence in the media. But it’s a good start at repairing the growing rift between the press and the public. It’s like putting a badge on everything you publish that says, “If you see a problem, we really want to know about it!”
So visit our Report an Error site, join the Alliance yourself, and grab some of our icons to use on your news pages and posts.
The Report an Error Alliance project is a collaboration between Craig Silverman of Regret The Error (and managing editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab) and myself. Though it grows out of my work on MediaBugs, it’s a separate effort, intended to distill the simplest, easiest, and most important step in this area that every news website can take.
