Photo by Red_Fox_Anna
My editor once told me, "once you see one of your mistakes printed 10,000 times, you'll never make that mistake again." And Craig Silverman's visit to class brought that quote back to mind.
My question is this, with the rise of citizen journalism and the new format of evolving stories, will publishing errors still exist?
We talk about how important it is to acknowledge the mistakes a paper has made. Publishing a falsehood or misleading statement has real effects. But when a story is never really finished are there ever such things as errors? Can every mistake found simply be explained away with an, "it was to the best of our knowledge at the time?"
Internet content has a far greater reach than anything someone physically publishes. And understanding that, it would seem that every mistake published electronically would be far greater than one published physically.
But despite this we seem to think of electronic content as less damaging than something physically printed. In many cases, it's supposed to be understood that citizen stories are a work in progress.
Are we, defacto, looking at the end of error?
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