Reuters changes kill rule after embarrassing error

The erroneous column two weeks ago was the first by a Pulitzer Prize-winning US tax writer who had just been hired by Reuters, David Cay Johnston.

When Reuters learned the day after it had been published that the column was wrong, it posted an advisory on reuters.com saying the column had been withdrawn. The column itself, however, went untouched for another couple of hours, when it was removed. That evening, Reuters posted a follow-up column by Johnston in which he acknowledged his mistake and described how it occurred.

James Ledbetter, recently appointed Reuters op-ed editor, said that in future a notice will be posted atop an incorrect article at the same time that the advisory goes out, and an editor will strike through the wrong portion of the article. If another article is pending, as in the recent case, the notice will say so.

“In essence, Reuters will move from an approach that made sense when it was a wire service with no online publishing home to one commonly used by bloggers to update and correct their posts,” the Florida-based journalism school the Poynter Institute said on its website.

“The correction/kill policy that is followed at Reuters is long-established by the wire service,” Ledbetter said. “There isn’t a procedure for taking down something that is wrong because for the vast majority of Reuters’ existence, there was nothing to take down.”

Under the new policy, erroneous posts will remain online even after Reuters publishes a follow-up.

“I think it stands as a transparent record of what occurred,” Ledbetter said. “I think to take it down – while I can see some argument for that – it’s not being fully transparent with our readers about the process, and it could be subject to abuse.”

Poynter said one advantage of the new approach is that it retains reader comments, which disappear when a post is deleted.

“In this case, user comments could have helped Reuters and Johnston identify a critical error within a few hours of publishing the original story,” Poynter said. Shortly after the column was posted on the morning of 12 July, a reader suggested in a comment that Johnston had misread News Corp’s documents.

By the time that the writer had tracked his error and an editor made the call to issue a “kill order,” the column had been up for more than a day and National Public Radio had interviewed Johnston about his piece. The station brought him back the next day to explain his error.

Johnston continues to write for Reuters. ■