It is sad to watch from Washington as The Washington Post stumbles through another embarrassing error, one aggravated by clumsy editing and internal confusion between print and online operations.
Like many newspapers and broadcasters, The Post carried the tragically wrong news late last night and early today that 12 of 13 trapped coal miners in West Virginia had been found safe and alive. Washingtonpost.com reported the story into the morning and a Page One headline in the Wednesday editions of The Washington Post carried this headline: "12 Miners Found Alive in W.Va. Coal Mine"
The bad news was made worse. Stuck with a print edition that misinformed its readers, The Post turned to its web site to make things right: it added a clarification above the otherwise wrong story. Citing the earlier version of the story that ran on Page One, the clarification linked to an updated story whose headline had been changed to: 12 Found Dead in W.Va. Coal Mine.
By mid-day hours after most other news organizations had sorted out the mess -- Washingtonpost.com was carrying an updated version of the story on its home page without acknowledging the errors in either the earlier version of the web story or in its printed edition. The "12 Found Alive" story remained on the site on a section page. If you clicked on The Washington Post "print edition" on washingtonpost.com, you could download a jpg of The Post’s front page with the original, uncorrected error, And if you went to the Newseum’s gallery of front pages, you’d see an earlier front page from The Post with a headline that was less wrong because it was more incomplete.
Confused? You bet. No doubt The Post and other news organizations will tidy things up as the day goes on. But at a time when the relevance and credibility of edited institutions and informed intermediaries are being questioned, they’ll have some explaining to do.
