What a Correction Tells You
A published correction feels like evidence that an outlet got something wrong, and it is. It is also the only externally visible proof that anyone there is checking, which makes it the most useful single signal available to a reader and the most consistently misread.
Every newsroom makes errors. The variable is what happens next, and there are only three possibilities: the error is corrected in public, corrected silently, or left standing. Two of those are invisible from outside. So a site with no corrections page is not a site that has never been wrong. It is a site that has decided not to tell you when it is—or one that does not have the machinery to find out.
What a Real Corrections Practice Looks Like
The International Fact-Checking Network makes this one of the five commitments a signatory has to meet: an open and honest corrections policy, published and followed scrupulously. Signatories are assessed externally rather than self-certifying, which is what makes the commitment worth anything.
In practice, the things worth looking for:
- A page you can find. ProPublica keeps a running corrections archive, dated, linked to the story each one belongs to, running back through a dozen pages of history. That archive is a liability the organisation chose to publish.
- The correction attached to the story itself. A note at the top or bottom of the piece, so that the next reader sees it. A correction filed only on a separate page reaches nobody who reads the article.
- What was wrong, not that something was. “An earlier version of this article misstated the figure” is a correction. “This article has been updated” is a disclosure that something happened.
- Proportionality. A wrong middle initial and a wrongly reported criminal charge should not be handled identically, and in a serious operation they are not.
- A route in. A named address that a reader can write to, which somebody answers.
Why This Is the Test That Survives
Most signals of quality can be imitated. A confident tone, a clean design, an “About” page describing a team, a masthead full of titles—all cheap. A corrections archive is expensive in the only currency that matters here: it is a permanent, public record of the times the organisation was wrong, maintained by the organisation itself, and nobody builds one unless the alternative is worse.
That is why it is worth checking before you need it. Look at an outlet’s corrections page on a quiet day, about a story you do not care about. You will learn more in two minutes than you would from an hour of arguing with a headline.
What Ours Says
Our fifth binding rule is that we correct on the record, and that the correction is as visible as the mistake. Two categories of error get priority here, and both follow from what this desk is.
The first is a wrong credit. We publish other people’s reporting onward; if we have credited an outlet or a journalist wrongly, or not clearly enough, fixing it comes before anything else we are doing that day.
The second is a status. Almost every case on this site turns on where someone stands with a legal system—charged, never charged, convicted, under appeal—and those change without warning. We re-verify against current reporting before publishing and record the date we checked. If a status here is out of date, it is wrong, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it.
The About page carries the rules and the address.