If you think your written work has been lifted or if you’re concerned that you might have copied something without attribution, you can use DupliChecker, which searches for blocks of text. Copyscape is a useful tool for Web publishers–it searches for copies of entire Web pages online. If you’ve written something that you want to keep from being lifted, you could set up a Google Alert for specific phrases.

Images have always been trickier to track. TinEye is a reverse image search that checks for duplicates online. You can plug in the URL for an image or a page containing an image, or you can upload your own image to see if it’s been used elsewhere.  Now, Google has gotten into the act with its new image search function that allows for drag-and-drop.

The Google Search mobile app also allows for image searching as well as voice searches–very cool. Hat tip to Paul Bradshaw for his post about Google image search on his Online Journalism Blog. As he points out, “the service should be particularly useful to journalists seeking to verify or debunk images they’re not sure about [like] the ‘dead’ Osama Bin Laden images that so many news outlets fell for.”

Any tools you’d add to the list?

To their credit, NPR news managers moved quickly to apologize for one speed-driven mistake — the false report that Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who had been shot at a constituent event in January, was dead. “In a situation so chaotic and changing so swiftly, we should have been more cautious,” Executive Editor Dick Meyer wrote the following day on NPR’s Web site. But NPR wouldn’t have taken so much flak for being wrong if it had just followed its own policies.

NPR says it had two sources for the report that Giffords had been killed, but it failed basic journalism standards by not indicating where the information came from. Also, its sources didn’t have firsthand knowledge. After learning that the congresswoman was alive and in surgery, NPR changed its story without mentioning the earlier report. That violated NPR’s written promise to correct “significant errors in broadcast and online reports.”

Errors committed while covering breaking news are regrettable but understandable. It’s ironic, though, for them to happen at NPR. The network prides itself on context and quality, on the kinds of stories that take time to report and produce. Regular listeners say they tune to NPR primarily for a mix of news, in-depth reporting, opinion and entertainment, not for latest headlines, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Off-air troubles

But NPR’s troubles with speed haven’t been confined to the air. When the network decided to fire Juan Williams from his part-time job as an analyst last fall, he got the word in a phone call. Apparently, NPR needed to cut him loose so quickly that his boss, Senior Vice President for News Ellen Weiss, decided a face-to-face meeting wasn’t necessary. Never mind that two days had passed since Williams remarked on Fox News that flying with people “in Muslim garb” made him nervous. NPR called that comment a violation of its guidelines, even though Williams said it on another network.

Williams had long been a controversial figure at NPR, which had gone so far as to ask Fox not to mention his association with the radio network when he appeared on TV. But as a somewhat conservative black voice at a mostly white network, he also gave NPR cover against long-standing accusations of liberal bias.

You’d think a decision to cut ties with Williams would have been handled with extreme care. NPR made such a mess of it that it turned into a PR nightmare. Tens of thousands of listeners e-mailed complaints. And NPR hit yet another speed bump when CEO Vivian Schiller said Williams should have kept his feelings between himself and “his psychiatrist or his publicist.” That sounded to some like a suggestion that Williams was mentally unbalanced. Schiller later apologized for speaking — guess what? — too hastily.

Repercussions

An independent inquiry completed in January found that Williams’ firing was lawful. But “because of concerns regarding the speed and handling of the termination,” Weiss, a 28-year NPR veteran, was forced out. Schiller got a slap on the wrist in the form of a lost bonus.

And that wasn’t the only fallout from the Williams case. Republicans on Capitol Hill seized on it as evidence of what they see as NPR’s leftward tilt. “The only free speech NPR supports is liberal speech with which they agree,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who introduced a bill to end federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wrote in an op-ed.

A cutoff wouldn’t hurt NPR directly because it gets little of that money. But about a third of the network’s revenue comes from fees paid by member stations that do receive government funds. So NPR was forced to fight back, with Schiller warning that defunding would be devastating.

While circling the wagons against external attacks, NPR brass also took criticism from within. Weiss supporters were furious that she was thrown under the bus, which some saw as capitulation to conservative critics. “It’s bad for public radio and bad for everything we believe in as journalists,” said Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.”

As its flagship program, “All Things Considered,” turns 40 this spring, NPR should be celebrating its position as a respected national news organization, one that managed to almost double its audience in the past 10 years while TV news and newspapers lost much of theirs. Instead, it’s having to deal with the embarrassing consequences of its own ineptitude.

So here comes that unsolicited advice: Slow down, NPR. Get back to doing what you do best — producing the solid, thoughtful journalism your listeners expect. Complete the ongoing review of your ethics policy, clean up the mess and move forward.

Just don’t do it too quickly.

Originally published in American Journalism Review, March 2011

What’s different this time around? The new edition includes substantial revisions but retains the essentials: how to report, write and produce for multiple platforms. We have chapters on delivery, ethics and job seeking as well. There’s a ton of real-world examples and advice from professional journalists. New screen shots, images and examples are included throughout.

There’s also a new focus on the use of social media and mobile devices in gathering and disseminating news. Difficult to believe, but Twitter didn’t exist when we wrote the first edition. My how times have changed:

A majority of journalists today use social media to do their jobs—mainly to find stories, sources and information quickly and to monitor trends. Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools, once used primarily in breaking news situations, have become a central part of the daily newsgathering process. TV anchor Amy Wood says she gets “lots of tips on breaking news” via her social media sites. One of her Twitter followers told her a hostage crisis at a local bank had been resolved before the police announced it.

We’re hard at work on a new companion website that will be available for use with the book this fall. You’ll be able to buy access to the entire site or to individual modules. Each online module–linked to a chapter in the text–includes interactive exercises, tutorials, resources and examples of multimedia storytelling. The “Ongoing Story” module allows users to report a story from beginning to end, and write a TV package as well as a Web version.

No matter what edition of the text you have, updated chapter-by-chapter content will continue to be available on the Advancing the Story blog.

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

Her book, News to Me, is a delightful memoir of what newspapering used to be, back when a kid without a college degree could start out as a newsroom clerk and wind up on assignment in Russia. Hertzel worked for the Duluth News-Tribune for 18 years and learned more than any J-school could have taught her before moving on to journalism jobs in Minneapolis. The biggest lesson: nothing trumps accuracy.

How did a small paper teach the importance of getting it right? Among other things, by requiring reporters to write a “groveling memo” whenever a mistake made it into the paper, “explaining how we had made the mistake and how we would keep from making mistakes in the future.”

It was humiliating and I resented it; we all resented it. We typed out memos while gritting our teeth. Reporters hate a lot of things–not being called back, getting scooped, being on vacation when the big story breaks. But we hate mistakes more than anything else.

Yes, it was a different time. But accuracy is (or should be) an enduring value. I can’t imagine any newsroom today demanding written apologies for goofs. But I have to wonder if more personal accountability wouldn’t help to stem what seems like a flood of errors in all kinds of media outlets these days.

Checklists like mine and Craig Silverman’s at Regret the Error can certainly help, but accuracy only happens if journalists care about it in the first place. “When a mistake crept through,” Herzel writes, “I was so upset my whole body grew cold.”  That’s how it should be for every journalist. But is it?

CBS Mobile's report was wrong; Spain beat the Netherlands, 1-0.

How many news sites make it easy for readers to report errors? Very few, according to MediaBugs, a pilot project in the San Francisco area that’s trying to hold the news media accountable and get them to fix “correctable mistakes.” The group reports that three-quarters of news sites it examined offer no links to report corrections.

Many bury information about how to report errors behind confusing trails of links. Some provide multiple, poorly labeled avenues for feedback without telling readers which ones to use for error reports. Others provide no access to recently corrected articles beyond a search on “corrections,” which often turns up multiple stories about prisons.

More than half of the 28 sites–newspapers, TV stations and others in the San Francisco area– “have no corrections policy or substantive corrections content at all.” That’s worse than what a national NewsLab survey found almost 10 years ago, when just a quarter of the TV journalists we surveyed said they worked in newsrooms with no clear-cut corrections policy. You’d think it would be easier to correct errors online but apparently it’s not being done.

MediaBugs is pushing to change that. The nonprofit, funded by a Knight News Challenge grant, thinks every site should have a “report an error” link displayed as prominently as the ubiquitous “share” and “email” links on every page. They’ve even developed a widget for Bay Area news organizations to let readers easily report problems through MediaBugs; so far, only Spot.Us is using it.

More transparency

In the meantime, readers and staffers are reporting errors through the MediaBugs site and having some success in getting them corrected, although it can take a while. In the process, readers can learn more about how mistakes happen, as when KCBS radio news director Ed Cavagnaro explained why two people who were quoted online weren’t named.

“Yes, the people interviewed should have been identified in the website version of the story, as they were in the on-air report,” Cavagnaro wrote. “In fairness to the webwriter, he didn’t have the spelling of the names. We still have to remind our broadcast reporters that we need the spelling of the names of interview subjects for the text versions of the story.”  Now that’s transparency.

The MediaBugs project seems like a useful experiment but in my view it would be ever so much better if individual newsrooms just made it easy for readers to report errors on individual stories. USA Today is one of the few sites I’ve seen that already does this consistently, with a note and an email link at the bottom of every story: “To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones.”

To their credit, the folks at MediaBugs say that approach would be fine with them, too. So who else is actually doing it? And if not, why not?

But a bigger reason for the increasing number of mistakes, he asserts, is the changing role of copy editors.

Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day’s newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where “search-engine optimization” is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties.

As a regular reader of the dead-tree edition of the Post, I can vouch for the fact that errors are up and it doesn’t take a retired high school English teacher to catch them. As Alexander notes in his column, a story about an car wreck involving retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said he had “slammed on the breaks” (brakes). Good grief!

Readers complain the errors aren’t just annoying, they’re damaging the paper’s credibility. “If they don’t care about basics like grammar and spelling, how much do they care about factual accuracy?” one reader wrote. Good question.

But the real question is: Who doesn’t care? To me, what’s happening at the Post and other newspapers reflects a workplace culture that has long tolerated sloppy copy from reporters on the understanding that editors would catch mistakes and fix them. With fewer copy editors on staff being required to shoulder more responsibilities, the cracks these errors can slip through have become chasms.

What these newsrooms need are reporters who understand that it’s their job to get it right before they turn in their copy and who care enough to take responsibility for all of their work, from fact-checking to spelling and grammar. Yes, it takes a little more time to double-check for accuracy but with trust in the news media at an all-time low, don’t you think all journalists should do whatever they can to try to restore it?

Smaller staffs, shorter deadlines and more platforms to feed. Is it any wonder mistakes get on the air and online? In today’s short-handed, 24/7 newsrooms, it’s more important than ever for anyone involved in producing content to double check it for accuracy. Don’t think someone else will catch even the most obvious errors. They won’t.

This ten-point checklist is designed to help. If you have suggestions to add, please let us know.

1. Confirm information that could be in doubt

* Any unattributed information (information that has no name attached to it) is a red flag, demanding further investigation. Even two sources may not constitute confirmation, because one source may have learned the information from the other. Always ask: How do they know what they know, and why are they telling me this?

* Make sure that anyone claiming to be an eyewitness actually was at the scene and in a position to observe what they are telling you. In breaking news situations in particular, people often sound authoritative when they are actually passing along unconfirmed rumors.

2. Clarify context

* Make sure the soundbites or quotes you choose to use fully capture what each person meant to say. A survey of people who were sources in television news stories found that one person in three said important information was left out of a story and one in five complained that his or her interview was taken out of context.

* If you need to, add information in your narration/track to put comments into context.

3. Look for what might be missing

* Review your story with an eye to significant information or points of view that have not been included. Look at each quote or soundbite, in particular, and ask: Who would disagree or take a different position?

* Contact people whose views are not reflected in the story and give them a chance to talk. If they decline, make mention of that in your story.

4. Review for focus

* Make sure your story backs up your lead. Have you over-reached or over-stated the story?

* Restate the focus of your story, and review the script to see if you have stayed on point or strayed from your focus. (A bonus: This is a good way to find places where you can trim the script to save time.)

*Plug your entire story into a word cloud generator like Wordle to see if your content reflects your focus.

5. Check names, places, titles

* Be sure you have attributed information to the correct source in every case.

* Make sure you have checked the spelling of proper names. If possible, check directly with the source. Press releases can be wrong. Even business cards may not show a current title.

6. Check spelling, grammar, usage

* Spelling and grammar count–especially in this age of graphics, closed captioning and Web usage. If you are not positive about a spelling, look it up. This list of commonly misspelled words can help.

* Read scripts out loud to find and fix grammar and usage problems. If in doubt, ask a colleague or check a reference guide.

7. Do the math

* Stories with numbers must be checked to make sure the numbers add up. Recalculate percentages, percent change, ratios, and the like, no matter where you got them. Online calculators make this much easier than it sounds.

* Check with an expert not involved in the story if you have any questions about how the numbers were calculated.

8. Fact check graphics

* Make sure the information you provide to graphics is correct–especially numbers. Call to confirm all telephone numbers and visit all Web addresses.

* Look at the completed graphic before air to catch mistakes.

9. Be precise about pronunciations

* Make a habit of checking the pronunciation of names and places while you are in the field. Ask people to say their names on tape, so you can go back and listen, if necessary. Use this list of commonly mispronounced words to find land mines in your script.

* If you are new to an area, be extra careful with names and places that may look familiar but could be pronounced quite differently from what you expect. Nothing raises more doubts about your credibility than mispronouncing a word your audience thinks you should know.

10. Screen the finished story

* Be sure that your words and pictures are telling the same story.

* Be sure the narration and soundbites match the finished script, and that mistakes have not crept in during tracking or editing.

Convert unit measurements (distance, weight or volume).

Adjust prices for inflation using the BLS inflation calculator based on the consumer price index.

Calculate change based on wage or medical cost inflation.

Compare cost of living in U.S. cities.

Convert currencies to make comparisons clear.

Break down loans or mortgage payments.

Compare salaries for job categories, by state.

Select and perform the right statistics tests for the right information.

Find out what time it is in other parts of the world.

Browse other online calculators for unit conversion, area, distance and other formulas.

“They identified someone else with my name on the screen.”

Every news director dreads hearing from upset viewers when the seemingly simple facts of a news story somehow end up being wrong. Ask any journalist and he or she will tell you that accuracy is a fundamental value. University journalism programs teach it, codes of ethics preach it and, in most cases, the audience demands it. Overall, the public gives the newspaper and television industries low marks for accuracy, but a NewsLab research study has come to a split decision. The study found that the level of factual accuracy for individual news stories in one market is relatively high, at least in the eyes of the people who should know best–the sources. Yet those same sources were much more critical of the overall accuracy of the stories.

The person whose name was mixed up with someone else’s was interviewed by a local TV news reporter in Cleveland. The error turned up when researchers from Kent State University randomly selected news stories from the Cleveland market and sent questionnaires to people who appeared on camera (see How the survey was conducted). We asked them a simple question–was the story accurate? The answers were not quite that simple.

Some errors may be inevitable. As anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows, given the amount of information that needs to be processed, it’s a wonder that the news is as accurate as it is. But if stations have a zero-tolerance policy for factual mistakes, then even a single error is one too many.

In our study, the people interviewed by Cleveland television stations said the newscasts were mostly correct when it came to factual information like name, age, date or location (see table A). For example, two percent or less reported problems with people’s names (mispronounced, misspelled or misidentified). Six percent of the people surveyed said the station got their job title wrong. And 12% reported some other factual error in the story, for example, reporting that someone worked “around the clock” when they, in fact, did not. Producers and tease writers aren’t off the hook, either. Eighteen percent of the sources said the introduction to the story was inaccurate.

Are these other factual errors insignificant – sort of the cost of doing business for journalists? Not according to the news sources who rated these mistakes as among the most serious (see table B).

Can a story be “accurate” but not quite “true?” Here’s where the results are troubling.

Television news is highly competitive; its reliance on slick production values can sometimes heighten a story’s excitement. In our survey, one person in three said that important information was left out of a story; one person in five complained that his or her interview was taken out of context, and nearly one in five thought the coverage of the particular event was both overblown and sensationalized (see table C). “I don’t think they want accuracy,” said one source. “They’re just looking for something that sells.” Another added, “If it bleeds, it leads. If it doesn’t bleed, it gets cut.” Even when you factor out the people who questioned a story’s accuracy because they had some sort of an axe to grind, you’re still left with a troubling number of people who got a bad taste from their journalistic experience.

Still, the numbers do contain some good news for broadcast journalism. Eighty percent of the people surveyed thought their interviews were placed in the proper context in the story and were not overblown or sensationalized. And the sources we surveyed perceived all five Cleveland TV stations to be more credible than the two newspapers that serve the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area (see table D).

So does this mean that TV newscasts are accurate enough? Accuracy is not something that happens automatically. It must be built into the operational system of the newsroom, and too often, as a separate NewsLab study found, it is not. Stations also need a systematic way to measure it – even if it is just an occasional telephone call to a randomly selected person who was interviewed. Accuracy and fairness are not necessarily the same thing, but they are two sides of the same coin. Journalists need to make sure that their stories are fair and balanced as well as compelling and highly promotable. News managers also need to listen. Too many get caught up in the newsroom’s institutional environment and forget that stories affect real people. Besides, it’s easier to be accurate in the first place than to make corrections later. Sources understand that, too. In the words of one, “It (the story) was better than I expected, and better than some other media treatment of the same story. I have learned there is no point in arguing with news directors after a story runs.”

How the survey was conducted: Researchers at Kent State University taped television newscasts on the five local stations in Cleveland, Ohio, and randomly selected 100 people who were interviewed for TV news stories. Subjects were sent videotapes of the stories and asked to rate their accuracy. Eight five people responded. The questionnaire was based on a similar set of questions asked of newspaper readers by University of North Carolina researcher Phil Meyer. The NewsLab study is the first time these questions have been asked of people who were interviewed for television news. The research was conducted by Professors Gary Hanson and Stan Wearden at Kent State.

References:

1.Gary Hanson is a 25-year veteran of television news. From 1984 to 1997 he was News Director of WKBN, the CBS television affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio. He now teaches journalism at Kent State University.

2. Table A: Factual errors
Incomplete interview 41%
Introduction inaccurate 18
Other factual error (mostly factual content errors) 12
Job title wrong 6
Wrong name 2
Misspelled name on screen 2
Mispronounced name 1
Time of story wrong 1
Typo on screen 0
Address wrong 0
Age wrong 0
Location wrong 0

3. Table B: Seriousness of the errors (scale 1 – 7; 7 = Major error)
Job title 5.40
Other factual error 4.90
Incomplete interview 3.73
Time of story wrong 3.00
Mispronounced name 3.00
Misspelled name on screen 3.00
Wrong name 3.00
Introduction inaccurate 2.43

4. Table C: Was the story misleading or out of context?
Important information left out 34%
Interview out of context 20
Event was less important 17
Story was sensationalized 16
Story was understated 11
Other interviews out of context 10
Event was more important 9
Numbers were misrepresented 8
Other interviews were distorted 7
Story was exaggerated 6
My interview was distorted 6
Other errors 3

5. Table D: Credibility (scale 1-7; lower number better)
WKYC-TV (NBC affiliate) 2.72
WEWS-TV (ABC affiliate) 2.76
WJW-TV (FOX affiliate) 2.87
WOIO-TV (CBS affiliate) 2.76
WUAB-TV (UPN affiliate) 2.92
Plain Dealer 3.73
Beacon Journal (Akron) 3.33
News magazines 3.44
Radio 3.36
Internet 4.05

The survey found that most stations just aren’t that specific about what to do when bad information gets on the air.

No formal process

Two-thirds of the journalists responding to the survey said on-air corrections are made at their stations, at least some of the time. The trouble is that many of them could discern no formal process for determining when and how to issue a correction. As one respondent wrote, “We…treat each mistake differently.” Another called the station’s policy “catch as catch can.” A third respondent said on-air corrections are reserved only for the most serious mistakes. “If it is a major error with possible litigation involved we will run an on-air correction.” But this person added, “In three years I have only seen that happen three times.”

Most stations that do have specific guidelines say they try to correct errors in the same newscast as the mistake was made, if at all possible. “Major errors are corrected immediately on the air, or during the next newscast if it’s discovered after the show is completed,” one person wrote. Other newsrooms require more than one correction, in an effort to reach the same audience that heard or saw the mistake. “If a correction is necessary it airs in the same position in the same newscast in which the error occurred,” one respondent explained. Said another, “We try to correct the mistake in that same newscast and place it as high as the original story (we don’t bury corrections).”

But fully one out of five respondents said they work at a station where there either is no corrections policy, or where errors are treated as an internal matter to be handled in a post-mortem meeting or a discrepancy report. “There is no system for tracking script errors and following-up,” one person wrote. “Usually there are conversations between the individuals involved, and promises to do better next time. That’s it.” Another described the station’s corrections policy as “indifference.”

Why make corrections?

Why bother correcting errors? People who worked at stations with clear policies said it’s all about maintaining credibility. “You ‘must’ accept responsibility for errors,” one person wrote. “Your viewers respect you more for it.. they don’t expect you to be perfect.” As another respondent put it, “I strongly believe that acknowledging error makes us stronger, not weaker.”

Yet most stations apparently don’t go that far. Instead of acknowledging error by airing a correction, one person said, “more often another story would be done updating what ‘we’re now told.’” Another respondent said errors are treated differently depending on who spots them. “Unless a viewer points it out, usually the newsroom also overlooks it.” That was apparently the case in several newsrooms. As one person said, “Most errors are swept under the rug hoping no viewer calls us on it.”

The survey results suggest there is plenty of room for improvement in how TV newsrooms deal with on-air mistakes. Check these suggestions from a former network news manager.

1.This survey was conducted from June 7 to July 4, 2001. Responses were collected online.

2. Amy Mitchell of the Project for Excellence in Journalism helped to analyze the results. Contact her at asmitch@journalism.org