A reader dropped me a note recently to point out several typos in a story on our Web site, Kansas.com. She ended her email with, “How does that happen and nobody notices?”
The truth is that in many ways, we’re still growing into the Web. We’re getting better at posting more breaking news — we now publish news all day on the Web site, while just a few years ago, the site was only a reposting of the morning’s newspaper.
With the printed paper, we have production systems in place that may be as old as newspapers: reporters write a story; they send it to an assigning editor for editing; typically, a senior editor then edits the story; then, a copy editor edits it for fact-checking and detailed editing (grammar, spelling, typos); then the copy desk supervisor looks it over.
It’s a complex assembly line (though not foolproof) that takes many hours for a story to go from reporter’s notebook to press.
That’s not an option in reporting for the Web. The premium is on immediacy. We tend to write shorter and faster — get the story online quickly. Our policy is to do that without budging on our standards of factual accuracy, fairness and ethical balance. That speed, though, means we send stories through fewer hands for the Web than we do for the printed paper. Generally a copy editor edits news articles, or a news editor. Occasionally both, but not always.
And in some cases — like this blog — no one edits. It would have been unthinkable in the “old days” for me to write a column and put it in the newspaper without having another editor read it. But I’ll look over this post, and then post it.
The reader also noted typos in photo captions on the Web site, and she’s right, we’ve had problems getting a system in place to get good captions on our photo packages. Photographers are extraordinary visual journalists, but aren’t always the best grammarians. They write the captions for their photographs.
The bottom line is that we’re still figuring out how to put safeguards in place for Web stories to balance speed and accuracy. The story the reader flagged was posted rapidly online to warn readers that the snowstorm before Christmas was becoming much more dangerous than originally believed. The editor posted it, then went back later and cleaned it up. In this case, he did the right thing. I’d rather get the information out there, with some typos, and fix it a couple hours later.
But we have to keep working to find the right balance — the systems that take us all day and night to publish a newspaper won’t work online. But neither will typo-riddled stories.
Beginning Friday, Feb. 1, we’ll require users of Kansas.com to log in to the site to make a comment on a story.