The Ethics Advisory Committee of The Canadian Association of Journalists recently published an article on best practices that news organizations should use when correcting or updating online stories.

They identified three main areas that are emerging in online corrections:

1. Helping readers report errors
2. Having transparency in corrections
3. Placement of corrections

From those emerging areas, they made the following recommendations:

Transparency

• All verified factual errors in digital content should be corrected promptly.
• We should aim for transparency, telling audiences when digital content has been amended or corrected.
• While we should not “scrub” content, minor editing to correct spelling and grammar errors that do not alter the meaning of the content for the reader may be amended without including a corrective note.
• In correcting and amending developing content, particularly in a breaking news story in which sometimes contradictory facts will emerge over time, we should be transparent with audiences throughout the reporting process about what we know and when we know it. When there is a significant verified change in the information first published, subsequent files should inform audiences about how the new information differs from what was first reported.

Engaging Readers

• We should make it easy for audiences to report possible errors of fact and errors of omission in digital content by providing a mechanism for audiences to report errors.
• But readers are not always right. Changes to digital content should not be made as a result of readers’ errors reports without verification.

Timeliness

• We have the ability – and responsibility – to correct digital content as soon as we verify something is wrong and no matter how long ago it was published. There is no time limit on making things right.
• We generally do not unpublish content if we discover errors. In some rare circumstances, there may be legal reasons to delete digital content entirely. This is generally done on the advice of legal counsel.

Placement

• When we verify factual errors in digital content, we should amend the copy to make it correct. In all but the most insignificant errors, we should also append a clearly visible note to the article to tell readers that the material was changed/edited/corrected from a previously published version and provide explicit details about what was corrected. For example: An earlier version of this article misstated the overnight price of a litre of gas as $2.40.
• Legal circumstances can determine where corrective notes are placed within online content. Generally, retractions and apologies for legal reasons should be published promptly and displayed prominently at the top of content. In some cases, it may be necessary to publish retractions and apologies more conspicuously on a website’s homepage to fulfill legal obligations.
• It should be easy for readers to find corrections. For instance, corrections may be captured on a prominent online Corrections page linked from a website’s homepage. And, when errors of fact are discovered as a breaking story unfolds through several published versions, corrective notes may be appended to link initial less complete reports to the most complete/correct report.
• If inaccurate information is broadcast through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, audiences should be informed of the inaccuracy – and when possible given correct information – through those same channels as soon as the error is determined.

You can read the full best practices report on the Canadian Association of Journalists’ website