Virtual Wite-Out   

Web sites need to think about how they fix their mistakes.

CORRECTIONS PAGE? That's for chumps.
Welcome to the Web, baby. This is the perfect world, where your facts are always straight, your spelling is meticulous, and your statistics add up. You want that hairy pie chart to go away? Poof! Never happened. Wish you'd double-checked the spelling of "Kyrgyzstan?" Execute a quick search-and-replace, and voilà! You're beyond reproach.
When online editors correct reporting and editing errors, they really aren't thinking that way. Heaven help them if they are.
They're actually thinking about the medium in the same way that we all regard it: a fluid environment where all work is "in progress" and initial inaccuracies are overwritten as stories are polished.
In that context, there are lots of reasons why online news sites generally don't bother with corrections pages.
Like live TV or radio, the cost of immediacy is the risk of error. That's understood and forgiven. Good reporters don't guess at the facts or publish unedited copy, but mistakes are inevitable during the rapid fire of breaking news. We fix them promptly and move on.
Particularly with Web publishing, those fixes are so simple and seamless that they become second nature. In five or 10 minutes an editor can correct a miscalculation that appears in three stories and republish them without a trace.
The painstaking task of documenting these corrections wouldn't behoove the reader even if it were possible. The notations would either be lost on a remote corrections page, or they'd muddle the main story text. Anyway, how many viewers care about prior gaffes they'll never see?
Even after the "breaking" period is over, a developing story might go through dozens of iterations in a matter of hours. Insert a paragraph, update the death toll, rewrite the headline, add a quote. "Updating" and "correcting" can become indistinguishable in the churn.
Of course there's also a tinge of pride involved. Unless someone saved or printed the page when the error was alive, they probably can't prove that it existed. Why volunteer that you were wrong if maybe no one noticed?
These are mostly sensible arguments, except that not all news on the Web is breaking news, and there comes a point--sometimes difficult to discern--at which a story crystallizes enough that accountability can be demanded.
I suggest that a threshold is crossed when the error is substantial enough and the story has been posted long enough that one, there's a good chance it's been seen by more than a handful of readers, and two, it represents a significant error in analysis or fact.
Deciding to create a correction plan is a commendable step, but several sites have probably stalled at the next challenge: figuring out how to present corrections on the Web.
A corrections "page" won't really work online, nor does the tradition of publishing a correction as prominently as the original error. Web sites aren't static enough for that; story positions change too often and viewers don't read Web sites cover-to-cover.
In search of inspiration, I recently surfed a few major news sites, seeking links to corrections pages and running site searches. Most of them either put no effort into correction, hide their corrections very well or never make mistakes, which isn't likely.
But on CNN.com, a site search for "correction" returned a note dated March 19, 2001, which read, "In a story published March 16, it was incorrectly stated that foot-and-mouth disease had been reported or suspected in Australia and New Zealand. CNN regrets the error."
I ran a search for the original story and, sure enough, the information had been corrected. The story text also contained a feature box repeating the correction notice. Any early visitors who returned to the story later would be able to see that an important change had been made.
This seems a realistic template for issuing and presenting an online correction statement. The story had been live for more than a day, and the error was significant. It would have been nice if CNN.com had defined its policy clearly on the site (I didn't find any other examples), but the fact that there was any treatment at all seems exceptional.
If integrity isn't a compelling enough reason to think about these things, consider the fact that content sharing is making errors harder to erase. With more sites grabbing one another's content outright or referencing it in research, slip-ups are more likely to be immortalized. Now imagine getting caught trying to swallow your own words.
Think publishing online means never having to say you're sorry? Well, maybe it does. Then again, a little humility never hurt anyone.