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Re: That's odd...
Posted By: ForensicDate: 9/30/00 9:54 p.m.

In Response To: Re: That's odd... (Mark Levin)

> I don't see this as beyond the scale of any article update made to correct
> a factual error. Especially since Matt himself, who originally said the
> quote, pointed out the error...

It's kind of a grey area as to if it's actually a factual error. Maccentral said "This is what Matt Soell said," and Matt said "Yes, that is indeed what I said." Now Maccentral is saying that he said something else, something he didn't say. They're introducing a factual error. (A first or a second one, depending on your perspective.)

'owevah.

It WAS out of context, and needed to be changed. In cases like these where the story could benefit from an update, it's better to put an editor's note off in parentheses, like

(Update: 9/30/00 Soell has let us know that Oni has progressed to beta 8 between the time he said this and the time we went to press.)

A bit of an aside to negate everything I just said...

The use of quotation marks is a grey area in journalism. The ideal is that anything inside quotes is what a person actually said, honest-to-god, with no paraphrasing whatsoever. Any paraphrasing is done outside of quotes.

In practice, this almost never happens. What reporters find out really quickly is that if you actually put into words what people say, they look stupid. There's so many ums, ers, and half-completed sentances that people actually get mad if you print it verbatium. So you pick and choose a bit, clean up the grammer some. The slippery slope begins. Last week, I talked to a Washington Post reporter who told me that it was only really crucial to get the exact wording of a quote when it was a prominant figure and other papers would be printing the same quote.

Some editors say that the only thing you need for exact quotes is to capture what the person was saying, even if they didn't quite say it in those exact words, which is what the quotation marks are supposed to imply in the first place.

The thing I don't like about the Maccentral correction is that they're changing it from something close to what Matt said to something further away from what Matt said on that fateful day two weeks™ ago. There's better ways to make corrections.


[ Message Index ]



Replies:

One Quick CommentMatt 9/29/00 5:15 p.m.
     Re: One Quick CommentHarry 9/29/00 8:08 p.m.
     Re: One Quick CommentMaestro 9/29/00 9:40 p.m.
     heheheh..Maz 9/30/00 4:40 a.m.
     Re: One Quick CommentApe Man 9/30/00 11:44 a.m.
     That's odd...Forensic 9/30/00 9:05 p.m.
           Re: That's odd...Mark Levin 9/30/00 9:23 p.m.
                 Re: That's odd...Forensic 9/30/00 9:54 p.m.
     Do you trust the publisher Matt?Chaoswarrior 10/2/00 5:45 p.m.
           Re: Do you trust the publisher Matt?Matt 10/2/00 6:55 p.m.
                 Re: Do you trust the publisher Matt?Bachus 10/3/00 12:49 a.m.



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