Newspapers are often criticized if they misattribute a quote or fail to acknowledge and credit the work of bloggers and members of the public when reporting a story.
It was refreshing, then, to see my local newspaper quickly amended online reports following a corrective comment. Even more interesting was seeing how the paper reaped the benefits of that responsiveness.
The corrective comment stemmed from an Aug. 4 Birmingham Post story about the council’s £2.2m overspend on a new Web site. Public Affairs Editor Paul Dale, who told me he spotted the story via a tweet, reported that details about the overspend were revealed following a Freedom of Information request by “a member of the public.”
He failed to mention in his story, however, that the “member of the public” was actually Heather Brooke, the investigative journalist who helped break the MPs’ expenses scandal.
He also didn’t mention that Brooke submitted the FOI request as part of an investigation for Help Me Investigate, a project she works on. (The tweet and the FOI request, by the way, both credited Help Me Investigate.)
The newspaper’s multimedia editor, Steve Nicholls, quickly amended the piece following a comment I made pointing out Brooke’s role in the story. “Comments duly noted and text edited,” Nicholls wrote.
But note what happened next: Because The Birmingham Post responded positively, I returned to the site and commented again. And I told my friends, who told their friends, many of whom clicked on a link and visited the piece. Some of them had never before commented on a Post story, but they registered to congratulate the paper for acknowledging story comments.
Blogger Pete Ashton pointed out on Twitter that the paper’s response may simply have been the result of a more personal matter involving the individual who responded in this particular case. But this wasn’t an isolated example.
A previous story (also generated by Help Me Investigate) that looked at the most-ticketed streets in Birmingham featured a comment thread that demonstrated a similar responsiveness to different commenters — this time from reporter Tom Scotney, who responded to a reader’s argument in the comments section of his story.
Nicholls said that both Scotney’s story and the city council member story received higher than average views, “most likely due to comments and related Twittering.” Sure, there could have been other contributing factors, but by being responsive to comments and acknowledging a mistake, the Post benefited from extra page views, extra time spent on the site, extra registrations and extra comments.
I know a lot of news organizations are implementing online strategies to both increase their number of page views and the amount of time people spend on their site. Giving journalists and multimedia editors time to respond to comments and correct copy in this way has to be one of the most sensible components of any such strategy.
