We’re taught from a young age that everyone makes mistakes. When those human mistakes happen in a news organization, as they inevitably do now and then, the outlet needs to quickly issue a correction.
“Our obligation is to the truth and if we didn’t get it right, it’s our job to make it right,” said Tom Kearney, who has been an editor since the 1980s, most recently with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Corrections are issued for relatively minor mistakes, like name misspellings, and larger factual errors. According to Ethics and Journalism, a project from New York University, “the key is correcting the error as quickly as possible and as thoroughly as necessary.”
Corrections are “a key format in journalism,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College professor who has researched the i