Craig Silverman (craig@craigsilverman.ca) is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Regret the Error, a blog that reports on media errors and corrections, and trends regarding accuracy and verification. The blog moved to The Poynter Institute in December 2011, and he joined as Adjunct Faculty. Craig writes a weekly column for the Toronto Star and has been a columnist for Columbia Journalism Review, The Globe And Mail and BusinessJournalism.org. He’s the former managing editor of PBS MediaShift, and was part of the team that launched OpenFile.ca, a Canadian online news start-up. His journalism and books have been recognized by the Mirror Awards, National Press Club, Canadian National Magazine Awards, and the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.
Alfred Hermida‘s research on social journalism can help journalists better understand verification and accuracy on Twitter. Two papers in particular caught my eye: “Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification” and “Twittering the News: The… Read more
U.K. tabloid the Daily Mirror apologizes for saying that a female musician was one of many women who supposedly slept with a well known BBC DJ:
Following our article of 1 May 2012 in which it was reported that Lyn Paul of the New Seekers was a “conquest” of Tony Blackburn, Ms Paul has contacted us to say that she merely shared a dinner date with Tony Blackburn and neither slept with him nor had a relationship with him. We are happy to make this clear and apologise to Ms Paul for any upset caused.
Via Tabloid Watch
The Huffington Post rather embarrassingly fell for a fake Twitter account and wrote a story yesterday about one of its tweets.
This is but the latest in the long running saga of hoax tweets being taken for real by… Read more
Call the irony police.
A Daily Beast story about some of the best correspondence from former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee (note the first name) contains this 1978 advice in reply to a young man who asked for… Read more
Today’s New York Times includes a correction to rectify a mistaken claim contained in a Brian Stelter story. In a look at the depiction of gay characters on TV, he wrote that Bill O’Reilly had complained about Chaz Bono… Read more
National Post sports columnist Bruce Arthur tweeted this image of a sports page from an early edition of Thursday’s New York Post:
Actually, the Washington Capitals beat the Rangers last night, forcing a seventh game in their playoff… Read more
This week, a powerful, infinitely shareable blog post was picked up by many news sites and shared online an astounding number of times. The story was that Abraham Lincoln had filed a patent application for an idea that was remarkably… Read more
The Guardian had to correct a correction about actor Eugene Levy. The first, from May 8:
A profile of Eugene Levy, the American actor famed for his role in American Pie, stated: “He’s keen to be the average Joe — neither his nationality (Canadian) nor his race (Jewish) have been the least bit important, he says, in forming his comedic sensibility.” It is wrong to use the words “race” when applied to Jewish people. They are best described as a people or an ethnic group, not least because Jews include those from a wide range of racial backgrounds (Strife of Pie, 27 April, page 12, Film & music).
And from May 9:
Mea maxima culpa. A correction in this column incorrectly made the actor Eugene Levy an American. Levy is Canadian as the sentence went on to make clear (Corrections and clarifications, 9 May, page 31).
The New York Times corrected the name of Howard Stern’s bulldog:
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Howard Stern’s bulldog. It’s Bianca, not Bernice.
The New York Times today corrected an error it first made in 1935, demonstrating that no factual error is too small to fix:
An obituary on Wednesday about the violinist Roman Totenberg repeated an error from a 1935 Times report on a concert in Washington at which Mr. Totenberg made his United States debut. He performed Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major — not in D Minor. (There is no such Beethoven violin concerto.) And the obituary misstated the surname of the pianist in the Alma Trio, which also included Mr. Totenberg and the cellist Gabor Rejto. He was Adolph Baller, not Bailer.