1. Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article (like the Washington Post, or the Albany Times-Union, Raleigh News-Observer, Rocky Mountain News, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor)
2. Start an editor’s blog, or ombudsman blog, or some blog written by somebody with the authority to write about the decisions the paper makes.
3. Write a guide to your content — online and off. Your readers don’t know and understand your product the same way you do: that’s a gap. A guide helps bridge that gap.
4. Provide a public place for readers to ask questions about news judgment, and a public place that people from the newspaper respond.
5. Give meaningful background on the people writing your articles. Tell the reader what potential ethics conflicts the authors have. Anonymous-but-for-bylines does not inspire trust. The Wall Street Journal did just that on their tech blog: author bios and author ethics statements.

I don’t think many newsrooms have much to hide — but I don’t think readers really get that. The more information newsrooms make available about who they are, what they do and why, the less room there is for faulty thinking. A see-through newsroom can only help.

I was in the middle of writing a guide on writing a guide for online news content (how meta) when this came across the radar:

The editor of the Greensboro N.C. paper spent time interviewing loyal, 7-day subscribers to the paper last week. More than one reader confused letters to the editor with editorials:

Occasionally, readers mistakenly assumed that letters to the editor reflected the paper’s position. One person said that our editorial on the Imus statement showed our liberal bias. (We’ve taken no such position.) Another said our constant anti-war editorials did that, too. (The editorial board, embracing the importance of editorials on local issues, has rarely written about the war.)

Newspapers have some explaining to do.

Read the whole post, “Changing (and not changing) with the times”.