A reader submitted that photo, which looks great. But, when the photo editor was readying it for print, well, the image told a different story:

Read the full story at Otterblog.

Related: Hackzine posts on how to detect forged photos algorithmically. Also, Ken Otterbourg wrote a part-two to his eclipsed post.

Now I’m not saying everybody oughta be perfect. But, with one of the top-three largest online newspaper operations in the United States, it seems like this is something that someone woulda noticed.

Also, and this I don’t understand: The Washington Post article says YourHub.com was “rolled out” by my employer, The Denver Post, and owned by its parent corporation, Media News Group. This is a new one. Usually, reporters say it’s the Rocky Mountain News on top of YourHub. Neither are correct — YourHub is a product of the Denver Newspaper Agency, which is the corporation that manages the JOA between the two Denver dailies.

And finally: that article does a good job of outlining the impressive detail the Post put into its hyperlocal effort. It is impressive. They’ve got the resources — so will they get the audience?

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”.

This is what they write:

What we experienced in 2006 was just a first round in wild independent journalism. The newspaper will learn to integrate their readers and act as filters with the help of their readership. That they have not figured out yet how to do that is nothing else but pathetic. Wasn’t the reader’s opinion section always the most read section of a newspaper (at least in Switzerland that is the case). The first Newspaper that manages to integrate key readers as democratic representatives of their readership, while building up a in interactive base concept in how they generate and structure content – will rule the online landscape of newspapers.

Newspapers are still far easier to read than online information. Imagine what the New York Times could be if it leveraged the intelligence of its readership. Imagine how that paper would sell.

I guess it’s a good thing that newspapers made some non-journalism web-oriented top-10 list. The prediction itself is reasonable. Information when done right is flexible, and right now most newspaper-dot-coms have a real inflexible approach to their information. Considering how much info passes through a newspaper every day, that’s a darn damn shame.

» Read the post here

(via GlobalNerdy)