Over four weeks in October I clipped the corrections column from six dailies — four English, two Hindi — and measured them. The variation in column-inches within any single paper across twenty-four issues was small. In one paper it was almost nil: the column occupied the same block, low on the same page, at very nearly the same depth, every day.
A newspaper does not make a consistent number of errors of a consistent size every day. Nothing does.
So the column is not reporting the errors. It is a fixed allocation of space that the errors are fitted into, and the fitting is done by somebody at a desk deciding which of the week's corrections are the ones that go in.
Then I went through the ninety-one corrections a second time and asked, of each, a different question: whether the error had been material to the claim of the story it appeared in. Sixty-one were not — a misspelled first name, a wrong designation, a date in a caption. Thirty were, in the sense that a reader acting on the original sentence would have been acting on something false. Nine of those thirty had run on a front page and the correction had not.
That ratio is the thing I keep returning to. It is the same shape I found when I counted unnamed sources for a week: a scarce and valuable instrument, spent mostly on the trivial, so that the instances where it matters are formatted identically to the instances where it does not and a reader cannot tell them apart.
Somebody has to decide, and a correction column existing at all is better than most of what this industry does. Not every error merits a printed correction, and treating a caption typo and a wrong figure in a lead as the same object would produce a column nobody reads. Editors are exercising judgment and judgment is what they are for.
The trouble is that the space came first. A judgment made against a fixed allocation is not a judgment about which errors matter; it is a ranking exercise with a cut-off, and the cut-off is set by layout.
What follows from that is measurable and I measured a piece of it. Of the ninety-one, I went back to the online version of each original story. In a little under half the cases the online story still carried the error, uncorrected, with no note. Several had been shared onward and were, by any reasonable measure of who read what, the version of the story that existed.
The print correction had discharged the obligation. The thing most people would actually encounter was untouched.
I raised this with a colleague at one of the six and got an answer I have thought about since: that the print correction is the record, in the sense that the paper of record is a physical object and the website is a service. I do not think he was being cynical. It is a coherent institutional position and it was true in 1995.
What I want is not a bigger column. It is that a correction attach to the thing corrected — appended to the online story, dated, visible, permanent — which every content management system in use in this country supports today and which costs a sub-editor about ninety seconds. Print the column as well, at whatever length the page allows. The column is for the reader who buys the paper. The note on the story is for everyone else, who is nearly everyone.
The best of the six, on this measure, was one of the Hindi papers, which appends corrections online and has done since before I started counting. Nobody has ever mentioned this in any of the industry discussions I have sat in, and when I asked their digital editor about it he seemed surprised that it was worth asking about, and said they had done it that way because it had seemed obvious.
