Lawyers will soon have to brush up on their web stats analysis.

As I typically graze on news early in the mornings, I’ve been finding it remarkable that retractions and corrections in news sources are completely live. Some of my friends, being journalists, always check the letters sections of a newspaper or magazine and review the corrections—to see who screwed up and how badly.

Now that most news sources have websites with up to the minute stories, opinion, and media like video, the approach to retractions has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of hiding or shying away from editorial carelessnes—online directors have turned their ‘problems’ into value-added content and proof of the health, immediacy, and integrity of online content.

On the New York Times correction page you can now quickly link to and from the articles in question—providing a new source of website traffic and possible advertising click-throughs. Each article is appended and flagged as “correction appended” with a footer describing the mistake. This system is at least cleaner than the UK’s Times online method of slashing away all mistakes.

My one question is how damages would be awarded in libel suits against online content or news sources. If libelous content were posted and then corrected or taken down, no lawyer would be able to argue for the value of the damages based on objective numbers. But assuming a NYT style of correction pages, and supposing damages should be proportional to the number of times the libelous material has been viewed; then website statistics could actually measure the amount of damage done. A lower traffic rate on a “correction appended” story would actually mean a lower value on damages.

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Posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:52 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.