Why won’t the Globe and Mail correct this story online?
A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is taking the Globe and Mail newspaper to task for refusing to correct the electronic edition of a story about him. Todd Maffin has a popular blog, which the article says is endorsed by the CBC - in fact it’s not - and Maffin doesn’t want to be perceived as being in the CBC’s pocket. But would the Globe fix the story online? Apparently not.
It was an error in fact that both the subject and the newspaper’s own journalist agreed needs correction, but the newspaper refused. I wasn’t asking for a print retraction — only for them to fix the inaccuracy in its electronic edition. A dozen keystrokes.
And that’s important because:
In today’s age, electronic versions of these articles are sent to news databases like Canadian Newsstand, CBCA, and so on, and stay there for eternity. The blog comments don’t [the reporter had pointed out the error on the Globe's blog]. This mean the Globe is choosing to deliberately let an inaccuracy stand in the public record. They could, very simply, make a quite note to the article or a correction, but won’t. I’m still unclear why. All the journalist could tell me was that his editors didn’t think it was “aggregious enough.”
Maffin concludes his post by saying:
Rather than deal with this again situation [sic], I’ll probably just avoid Globe and Mail interviews in the future. Use your own caution.
Posted: October 31st, 2006 under Guest Experiences, Print Interview Case Studies.