Joho the Blog
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March 17, 2005
RageBoy, everyone's Chief Blogging Officer, has a good example (involving something I wrote) of how errors creep into the media: The humor was missed, the main point was ignored in favor of the inflammatory one, and the nesting of the quote was flattened. The point isn't that the media sometimes make mistakes. We all know that. For me, the point is that it was too small an error for the medium to acknowledge. I suppose I could have written a letter and they would have run it in their corrections box. But that would have been so long after the event that, with a mistake this size, who would have remembered the context or cared? But, had it been a blog that got it wrong, the blogger would have fixed it immediately, probably with a little embarrassed aside. So, while bloggers may get more facts wrong, our corrections are finer-grained. And, of course funnier. Posted
by D. Weinberger at March 17, 2005 09:06 AM
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Comments
Only if the blogger were well-intentioned or subject to peer pressure (which is not inherent).
Posted by: Matt Stoller | March 18, 2005 12:55 AM
I know that's our mythos, that we correct immediately and inline, but we don't. It's just not true. Search for something like "autolink smart tags inventor" and you'll see that Rubel corrected himself, and nobody else that I saw who had used those terms did. Especially in that enormous class of things where it made a good story, and corrected it doesn't, it's only the real pros (in the admiring sense, not the money-making sense) who correct themselves.
Posted by: Phil Ringnalda | March 18, 2005 03:02 AM
I should have added: At its best.
But that's generally true for what I write.
Posted by: David Weinberger | March 18, 2005 09:04 AM