Corrections are an issue, and in my experience can be a big source of strength if you adopt the correct process toward them. In financial markets, your reputation depends on accuracy, and a slip will result in a sudden and very unpleasant relationship with your readers. But if you are pushing for results/exclusives/differentiation in a crude way to defend audience share, then you will make big mistakes from time to time. And this is where much of the press have put themselves.

In that light, I agree with you, Martin. It has been said by others that discussion of politics is constantly framed around the personal, so the issues aren’t really getting covered. It’s harder to frame a story around a complex subject than tell a tale of two ordinary Downing Street folk. I believe the paying audience is there, and globalization might make it larger. It would take patience to develop.

To (very selectively) quote from a study on media transparency: “The greatest surprise of the study was how most news outlets handle corrections. Only 11 out of the 25 news sites visibly post corrections…”

I’m enjoying your blog. And agree with you on this one except to say that if newspapers can raise their efficacy to the power of ten by collaborating more internally, they can do the same with their readers, and even their erstwhile ‘competitors’. As you say, the problem is the newsstand is a combative environment. From the outside, I don’t think they really get collaboration even though they’ve embraced the technology.

Martin. We’re told not to believe everything we read in the press but all to often we do believe it because of the veneer of respectability. On the Web contentious items are debated, and vilified and the reader must make up his own mind. Take a look at this from Foreign Policy. If newspapers are going to claim superior quality control, they’d better get their own houses in order!

Ultimately, there seem to me to be two issues here. First, do we need quality control somewhere? Second, how do you get people to pay for the costs of producing reliable information, given the public goods nature of this output? The answer to these questions may be that nobody is going to do quality control in our brave new web-enabled world and nobody is going to pay for reliable information either. The results could be dreadful. Indeed I would argue they are already dreadful. The quality of public policy debate is abysmal in most advanced countries, partly as a result.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry is stuck in a self-declared state of crisis, with classified advertising decimated by free online listings and the bulk of their stories (taken from the same wire services as every other paper) quickly becoming a commodity.

Newspapers and local websites are a perfect match. Newspapers have the reporters, the relationships and the resources to provide better coverage of their local areas than anyone else could even dream of. That’s exactly what the team at the Lawrence Journal-World have spent the past five years doing.

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Jun/11/local/