I wanted to correct a mistake I made yesterday
in my column about
The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa)
Gazette's
excellent investigation into prostitution in rural America.
I said the photojournalist who did this work was the only staff photographer at the paper, which was wrong.
Brian Ray is the only staff photographer at the Iowa City Bureau, but the paper has a half dozen photographers. I've corrected it in the online version but wanted to mention it in this e-mail because I suspect many of you
only read the e-mail version of Al's Morning Meeting and don't keep coming back to
Poynter's Web site during the day, even though we continuously update the site and the Morning Meeting blog.
In making this mistake, I learned something about the pride that the people at
The Gazette have for the paper. Within 10 minutes of the Morning Meeting e-mail hitting inboxes around the country, I received four nice e-mails from folks at the paper pointing out the problem.
I wonder how those of you reading this make online corrections, especially when you have a mistake in an e-mail. If it were a horrible defaming kind of mistake I suppose one could send another e-mail. But correcting it online without correcting it in a follow-up e-mail doesn't seem like enough.
I know the best solution is to get it right the first time, but when you don't get it right, how do you handle the correction on your Web site?
Here is how we handle corrections for Poynter Online. I would like for those of you who have thoughts about this
to drop me a line or, better yet, drop a note in
the feedback section of this column for everyone to consider.
