NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard pushed for a Report an Error button from the Report an Error Alliance to be added to NPR.org in a long, well-thought-out blog post. Highlights follow:
One of the surest ways for a news organization to keep and gain credibility is to have an easy-to-use mechanism for reporting mistakes and a quick process for correcting them.
It’s inevitable that even the best, most thorough news organizations will make mistakes. The question is how they handle them. (Most do so poorly.)
Today, as more people get much — if not most– of their news online, there needs to be a common agreed-upon standard for reporting and correcting errors.
Two journalists who care very much about this issue launched an initiative last week to get news organizations — big and small — to come up with a standard on how to make it easier to report mistakes.
Craig Silverman of Regret the Error and Scott Rosenberg of MediaBugs started the Report an Error Alliance.
