Regret the Error is both a website and book by Craig Silvermar.
From the website:
Regret the Error reports on media corrections, retractions, apologies, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the press. It was launched in October 2004 by Craig Silverman, a freelance journalist and author based in Montreal.
Silvermar’s free accuracy checklist is one that reporters (dare I say bloggers?) would do well to follow.
Silvermar recommends printing and laminating the checklist so you can use it with a dry erase pen to check items off.
Better than not having a checklist at all but that seems suboptimal to me.
For example, in a news operation with multiple reporters:
- How would an editor discover that multiple reporters were relying on the same sources?
- Or the same sources across multiple stories?
- How would reporters avoid having to duplicate the effort of other reporters in verifying basic facts such as names, titles, urls, etc?
- How would reporters build on the experts, resources, sources already located by other reporters?
Questions:
How would you:
- Convert Silvermar’s checklist into a topic map?
- How would you associate a particular set of items with a story and their being checked off by a reporter?
- What extensions or specifics would you add to the checklist?
- What other mechanisms would you want in place for such a topic map? (Anonymity for sources comes to mind.)