TBD

By Steve Buttry and Erik Wemple

TBD will be a non-traditional journalism organization in many ways. But we’ll be really old-fashioned in one respect: Our commitment to accuracy.

In fact, we are hopeful that you will see that our new-school ways help improve our performance in this old-school value.

A recent comment on this blog asked: “How does TBD ensure accuracy in reporting? What mechanisms does TBD have in place so that readers will trust that the content on the site is accurate?”

A valid question, and we welcome it.

The response starts with corrections. We will be as aggressive in correcting our mistakes as we were in making them. Each article or blog item that includes a mistake will carry highly visible correction, and a repository for all corrections that appear on the site will be available sometime after launch. The corrections policy will apply to all errors of fact as well as misspellings of proper nouns and the like. Errors than can be classified as typos will get a pass.

We’ll be inviting our readers to fact-check us. A box will accompany most TBD articles under the banner “Complete This Story.” It’ll prompt users to tell us what’s wrong, and it’ll also note the story’s weaknesses as identified by editors and reporters at TBD, inviting you to help us fill the holes.

Furthermore, the blog that you’re reading now will continue and will become a running conversation with the community, with a standing often-stressed invitation to call to our attention to any errors we make and any you see in the TBD Community Network.

But that’s just a way to correct errors. We also want to make sure we get things right in the first instance. We are hiring a staff of excellent professional journalists who share our commitment to accuracy and verification. To underscore that, TBD content will be filled with links to original source documents and online sources. We regard linking to sources when they are available as a matter of ethics, an essential act of accuracy and accountability. We’ll have a lot of video content, so you often will be hearing quotes as people said them, not just reading what our reporters scribbled in their notebooks.

We trust that the bloggers in our TBD Community Network share our commitment to accuracy. If we learn of someone who is repeatedly careless with facts or refuses to correct errors, we will stress the importance of accuracy and offer tips for improving their performance. We know that many of the bloggers in our network are professionally trained journalists who understand how to verify facts and find the truth. Others may lack that training, but we will offer workshops and we trust their commitment to get the facts right. We don’t expect this to happen, but if we have a staff member or blogger who consistently makes mistakes or refuses to correct errors, we would coach them in improving their accuracy, and eventually, we could end that association if we didn’t see improvement.

We’ll make mistakes. Journalists always make mistakes and we may make a few more because we’ll be trying new things and engaging the community in our news gathering and taking risks. We think the community will help us get it right more often than they will steer us wrong, but it would be foolish to say we we’ll get everything right. But we can promise that getting things right is our top priority, that our innovative efforts will include ways to improve our accuracy, and that we will be as transparent as possible in correcting and explaining errors.

When Steve Buttry, TBD’s Director of Community Engagement and one of the authors of this blog post, was at the American Press Institute, he led two series of ethics seminars, the second one focusing entirely on the ethical challenges of the digital age. He led discussions with hundreds of journalists at more than two dozen newsrooms and conferences across North America. An accuracy workshop was one of the most popular sessions. At the end of this post, we will include some links to online resources on journalism ethics. We encourage TBD Community Network members and other journalists, whether you’re part of TBD or not, to read them and make sure they are taking all the steps they can to verify information and ensure accuracy.

While we will have high expectations for our staff and network on matters of accuracy and other ethical matters, we will not try to force everyone to follow one standard. We are not planning to be the old-school-ethics cops. Some members of the network are blogging about their passions and about community activities with which they are involved. That doesn’t fit the traditional journalism standard of independence and neutrality. We think in these cases transparency should be the prevailing ethic. We will encourage network members to disclose their involvements with the topics they address. But we won’t hold them to the same standards we hold for our staff.

Let’s address one perception, though: This issue of different standards is not a one-way street, with all the concerns swirling around the new media. Accuracy and ethics are continuing challenges for traditional media, too. Buttry has been misquoted in the Chicago Tribune (years ago) and misparaphrased in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (also years ago and partly his fault for not being completely clear, and we can’t guarantee that won’t happen with one of our reporters and their sources). Buttry has blogged before about concerns about the social media guidelines and the confidential sources practices of the Washington Post. This week, some local tweeps noted that a Post blogger used a photo from a local blogger and passed along a story the blogger had written (about police harassing a photographer), but failed to credit the blogger:

1. 
   phearlez WaPo “heard of a case.” This is a step DOWN from “a local blog,” WaPo. http://bit.ly/c0ELD0 14 Jul 2010 from Tweetie for Mac
2. 
   tbridge You know, @postmetro, for every story like http://bit.ly/c0ELD0 that steals sources from local blogs, I root harder for your bankruptcy. 14 Jul 2010 from Tweetie for Mac

Journalism is a pursuit of excellence, not the achievement of perfection. Some bloggers may not meet our standards of accuracy, and we’ll work with them to improve and will continue to link to their content unless they show they don’t care about accuracy. And we’ll link to the Post’s content, even if it doesn’t meet our standards for attribution and unnamed sources.

Resources for journalism accuracy and ethics

Accuracy first

Accuracy is more important than ever for journalists

Remember the old editor’s advice: Check it out

Resources for journalism ethics

Some of these materials could use updating, which we will do before we present any workshops for TBD staff or bloggers. Please feel welcome to add links to other helpful resources for ensuring accuracy, or to raise your questions about any matters of journalism ethics or TBD’s plans.