We strive to be perfect and 100 percent accurate. We don’t always achieve that.
And just as importantly, it’s not always easy to know when something you’ve read has later been corrected. You, after all, already read it. To try to address this, we send out all corrections from our @voiceofsandiego Twitter account and individual reporters also send out their corrections via Twitter.
But there are plenty of you who aren’t on Twitter or could easily miss that note as it shot through your stream of information. So here’s a second step in our attempt to be more transparent and accountable: A corrections page where you can see our most recent stories that have contained errors, large and small.
We know it’s still not perfect. It relies on you coming proactively to this page to see where we’ve messed up. However, it’s one step and at least gathers all of these stories in one space. We’ll continue to search for more ways to make the corrections more obvious and publish stand-alone posts describing corrections that we feel are especially noteworthy or egregious.
For background, here’s the corrections section of our Ethics and Standards Policy:
• Our journalists must immediately notify a supervisor when they become aware of an error or when someone asks for a correction or clarification.
• At no time will a reporter make the final decision about whether a correction to his or her work is required. A supervising editor will make the decision.
• When errors occur, we will correct them promptly and clearly note the correction or clarification in the body of the article.
• If an error is severe — resulting in an incorrect, misleading or unfair impression of the significant facts of a story — we will immediately correct the story itself and include a note directly under the headline. We will also make note of the error on the front page of the VOSD website in the This Just In news blog.
• Other errors — such as misspelled names and words, poorly worded headlines and grammatical mistakes — will be corrected but may not require written corrections.
Do you have a suggestion of how the corrections process could be better? Let me know: You can reach me at andrew.donohue@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0526. Follow me on Twitter and find out when I make an error: @AndrewDonohue.