Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If my annual tally of plagiarism and fabrication incidents is the depressing part of “Regret the Error”‘s year-end coverage, then this annual collection of the best of the worst in errors and corrections is the highlight.

That’s not to say the mistakes detailed below are minor or purely amusing; many are serious failures.

But it’s important to acknowledge the amusing and outrageous, and to collect them to help journalists avoid making the same mistakes.I also want to celebrate the correction writers who went beyond the call of duty to offer something special.

Here’s the best and most notable of 2012′s media errors and corrections....

We — John Borthwick and Jeff Jarvis — want to offer constructive suggestions for what the platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, Apple News, and others — as well as publishers and users can do now and in the future to grapple with fake news and build better experiences online and more civil and informed discussion in society.

Key to our suggestions is sharing more information to help users make better-informed decisions in their conversations: signals of credibility and authority from Facebook to users, from media to Facebook, and from users to Facebook. Collaboration between the platforms and publishers is critical. In this post we focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Google search. Two reasons: First simplicity. Second: today these platforms matter the most.

We do not believe that the platforms should be put in the position of judging what is fake or real, true or false as censors for all. We worry about creating blacklists. And we worry that circular discussions about what is fake and what is truth and whose truth is more truthy masks the fact that there are things that can be done today. We start from the view that almost all of what we do online is valuable and enjoyable but there are always things we can do to improve the experience and act more responsibly.

In that spirit, we offer these tangible suggestions for action and seek your ideas.

'There is plenty of room for light, fun pieces across newspapers. The issue comes when this casual, easygoing attitude towards numbers, statistics and the world at large extends into serious issues.'  

There was quite the bombshell in the news this week. It turns out that, contrary to expectations, women don't look their oldest in their 80s or 90s. No,the Telegraph reveals, they look oldest at 3.30pm on a Wednesday.

 

Except, utterly obviously, they don't. The story is the latest in a stream of "polls", "surveys" or "research" designed to do nothing but promote a company's new product.

 

In this case, it worked nicely. The story's fifth paragraph notes the "study" was "carried out by the tanning brand, St Tropez"....