If I’m not mistaken, today marks the debut of a freestanding correction section on The Boston Globe’s website. The move is long overdue; nearly two years ago I wrote about the shortcomings of online corrections in both the Globe and The New York Times.
Though the Globe appends online corrections to the original articles, it had not up until now run them separately, as it does in the print edition. That was fine for archival purposes. But if you simply read the paper online every day, you had no way of knowing whether something had later been corrected.
In any event — kudos.
Correction: This is a whole lot more complicated than I had first thought. See my follow-up.
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Andrew Langmead
I know that when the Boston Globe content was on Boston.com, they included the corrections. I don’t know what happened after the Globe took it all back to put on BostonGlobe.com.
When Craig Silverman’s Regret The Error was its own site, it included the Globe in its links to Newspaper’s correction pages: https://web.archive.org/web/20041206183834/http://www.regrettheerror.com/ (a 2004 copy with a link to Globe corrections) On Twitter I also included an archive.org link to the corrections section front and Joel showed a Google search that would show other correction pages over the years.
On the other hand, the page was hard to find. It was rarely part of any site navigation and got little traffic.
I don’t recall seeing the in-article corrections as you describe. Do you have any examples of those?
Neither in-article corrections (which require readers to visit previously read pages) nor a corrections page (which few would check) are good solutions. To me, what seems like the best way to have the web site keep track of the pages you’ve previously seen (which it already does for advertising purposes) and add a special notice to your site if a page you’ve visited has had a correction.