The Observer’s tangle with science story — now removed from website July 25, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, National newspapers, News, Newspapers, Online, Research, Teaching resources, corrections, science , 1 comment so farThe Observer seems to have pulled a front-page story from its website, after problems emerged with the article, which was published on 8 July 2007.
The case raises some interesting questions not only about science reporting — but also about corrections and clarifications, and the importance of some journalistic essentials.
Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column in The Guardian, has analysed the article in detail in his column and on his blog and in the British Medical Journal.
He’s expressed his concerns forcefully (follow the links above to read his detailed analysis):
I am pretty jaded and sceptical, but this front page story has completely stunned and astonished me. The misrepresentations and errors went way beyond simply misunderstanding the science, and after digging right to the bottom of it all, knowing what I know now, I have never resorted to hyperbole before, but I can honestly say: this episode has changed the way I read newspapers.
The difficulties lie not only with the original story, Ben suggests — but also with the clarifications from The Observer’s Readers’ Editor, Stephen Pritchard, which appeared in the two following issues: on 15 July and 22 July 2007.
Ben Goldacre’s assessment of the situation:
Two failed “clarifications” later that clarify nothing, and I am even less impressed. Retract. Delete. Apologise.
One of the journalistic failings seems to have been that no-one from The Observer apparently contacted Dr Fiona Scott, even before publishing the first clarification. She then posted some comments online, which The Observer published as part of its second clarification — again without having spoken to her or exchanged emails, it appears. However, it took Ben Goldacre a quick Google search and a couple of hours to get an email reply, as he notes in this post.
The original Observer article used to be online here. The Google cache of the original story is here — or at least it when I wrote this post. But if the article was pulled for legal reasons, perhaps it won’t be on Google’s cache for much longer.
Will The Observer run a third clarification next Sunday?
Meanwhile, credit to its sister paper, The Guardian, at least, for publishing Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column on the article.
Press Gazette and hackademic.net — thinking alike June 12, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Headlines, Journalism, News, Newspapers, Online, Subbing, Teaching resources, Typos , add a commentPure coincidence, of course, that Press Gazette’s diarist, Axegrinder, picked up on two of the same stories featured on hackademic.net last week. You saw them here first — if you were one of my early readers, anyway.
The ‘Grammer School’ billboard is on the PG blog, and the Mail and Express front pages about house prices appear in the print version (right).
Any sub knows the difficulty of avoiding occasional mistakes. Such as ‘backpeddling’ in an Axegrinder headline. Confusing pedal and peddle seems to be a classic — one of The Guardian’s homophone horrors missed by spellcheckers. After making the error in a review of a cycling book, The Observer corrected succintly:
Our review […] included the phrase: ‘The story of her lonely peddling makes for evocative reading.’ Cyclists pedal. Pedlars peddle.
But I bet we’ll see pedal/peddle cropping up again. Can you tell that I used to be a sub, by the way?
US and UK journalism compared June 5, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, NYTimes, News, Newspapers, Online, USA , 1 comment so farI’ve picked up on a few articles comparing journalism in the USA and UK — partly because of talks I’m giving to journalism students from US universities this summer.
“Superiority Complex — Why the Brits think they’re better” is the headline on an article in the current Columbia Journalism Review. It reiterates claims that interviewers from the UK have the edge in broadcast news, and discusses the appeal of UK newspapers’ websites and BBC World to readers and viewers in the States.
When it comes to newspapers, is the boot on the other foot? It does for sourcing, balance, overall reliability and investigations, suggests Susan Hansen’s CJR piece, quoting Alan Rusbridger (The Guardian), Bill Hagerty (British Journalism Review), and Tom Fenton (CBS).
Martin Moore contrasts the approach of stories in the Daily Telegraph and New York Times, highlighting the greater length, more neutral tone, larger number of sources and quotes etc in the latter. It also risks being heavier, more boring and less engaging, he notes.
There may be less space for longer stories in the New York Times after it changes format. Executive editor Bill Keller says, according to Gawker:
Our stories are too often too long… The 1200 word stories could be 800 or 900. There are editors at a Page 1 meeting boasting that a story is only 1400 words.
Also worth noting is Keller’s frank statement about the NY Times’ online strategy for developing revenue from its web contact: “There’s a phrase they use in drug and alcohol rehab—’fake it til you make it.’ That’s basically what we’re doing.”
Finally, still at the NY Times, Investigations Editor Matthew Purdy says they have “12 permanent reporters and editors” plus “many more Times reporters engaged in investigative or in-depth reporting”. Another US-UK difference to add to the list, then.
Re-read for accuracy, grammar and spelling June 4, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Headlines, Journalism, News, Newspapers, Online, Typos , 1 comment so farIt’s tempting to think the Evening Standard was aiming at irony with this billboard. But that would be too subtle a strategy to succeed, I suspect — and a limited readership (although perhaps under-targeted…)
The same error in The Times Online was corrected — but only after it had been published on the site and started to show in news feeds, as Adrian Monck noted. It did appear online in that form on The Times Online, as Google’s cache showed for a while:
The corrected headline then appears to have replaced the previous version in Google’s cache, too — although a reference to it lives on in one of the ‘Have your say’ comments from a reader, referring to the uncorrected headline:
“Tory resigns after grammer school row” — such a headline in the Times is a case against comprehensives.
Dagmar Alpen, Cologne, Germany
Confusing the readers: divergent stories from the same source June 1, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, News, Newspapers, Readership, Teaching resources , 2comments
Confusing if they see the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, that is. Choose between “Is the house price boom over?” and “House prices still soaring” respectively.
These are going in my file of possible examples to look at with students — at first glance, the stories look contradictory. On closer inspection, it’s a matter of emphasis, both using Land Registry figures in different ways: the Mail story concentrates on those for the month of April, while the Express piece looks at the annual increase.
Both angles were fairly clear in the Land Registry source document (PDF here), although the annual 9.1% increase was flagged up more prominently.
One aspect of stories that students sometimes find tricky to pick up, at least to start with, is how a chosen angle might play with readers. Here it’s “welcome news for homeowners” (Express) or “end of the 11-year property boom [...] alarm bells sounded [...] bubble appears to be bursting [...] situation now is likely to be even worse” (Mail).