Otterblog

Corrections are an important part of a newspaper’s attempt to be a transparent and credible institution. Almost all are a result of trying to cram a day’s worth of news into a paper on a short deadline. I spend a lot of time dealing with corrections, and there is almost always shared blame. A reporter may make the error, but editors looked at the copy and didn’t see the failed logic etc.

We ran an interesting correction last week from a story in the New York Times. Maybe you remember the story. It was about a purported plan by Airbus, the big airplane maker, to produce a plane where passengers would stand instead of sit, so even more passengers could be crammed into place. Without laps, so to speak, there’s more room for fares. It got a lot of play, in the Journal, and elsewhere.

Turned out, however, that Airbus, had abandoned the idea about two years ago. The story wasn’t really a story, more of a glimmer of an idea. This is not to slam the Times. It’s a great paper. And everybody makes mistakes.

The Times has a public editor, a guy named Byron Calame. He wrote an interesting column about the Airbus affair. Calame breaks down the errors of omission and comission that led to the mistake. It’s not pretty, but it’s a good tour of how big newsrooms work and how things can fall between the cracks if people aren’t careful.