#corrections

06/30/2015 - 12h03

It was an unfortunate week for Folha. Mistakes are by their nature extremely dynamic for journalism, but a close examination of incorrect information or headlines over the past two days is worrying and discomforting.

I'll start with the oldest one: on Saturday (June 20), in the edition that carried coverage about the arrest of two executives from contractors Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez, the political news section said in a headline: "Operation is severely criticized by judicial means."

The story, as defined by a reader, was clumsy: of the four people consulted, three are lawyers representing defendants in the Car Wash bribery scandal, and the fourth is former Supreme Court justice Gilson Dipp, who wrote an opinion on behalf of Galvão Engineering in which he criticized the accusations against Alberto Youssef as legally "useless."

"It is the role of lawyers to put forth the best version for their clients, but they can't be characterized as 'judicial means.' Didn't anybody in the newsroom realize that the story did not mention any lawyer who was not an interested party?" wrote one reader.

On Tuesday (June 23), the business section reported that, according to a global study, 23% of Brazilians paid to access news online in 2014. The number puts Brazil in the vanguard worldwide, leaving in second place, with 14%, Finland, one of those Nordic countries which manages to humiliate the rest of the world in all the indexes.

I observed in my internal critique that there, the data could make sense. The Finnish population is about 5.5 million inhabitants, with 97% having access to the Internet; those who pay for access would total 770,000. In Brazil, where only 54% have access to the Web, it's hard to believe that 47 million would pay to consume digital news.

The correction came out on Friday (June 26): "It is correct to assert that 23% of Brazilian Internet users who read news paid at least once for this type of contents last year." Does anybody know how many Internet users read news?

On Thursday (June 25), Folha put on its Website for five minutes a bombastic headline, also published on Twitter: "Lula asks Justice Department to not be jailed by judge in Car Wash Scandal."

Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had nothing to do with the mess. The problem was that the news went out before contacting the Lula Institute.

"The newspaper corrected the error after obtaining a copy of the legal document. The correction came out on the Website and Twitter," the newsroom said.

The problem is that the system of corrections in the digital version is much worse than in the printed version. Recognition of the error came in small letters at the bottom of the story.

The report about Lula is long; it's necessary to read all the way to the end (which is rare) or scroll down the screen at least four times to see the advisory - only a link which takes you somewhere else.

If you never see the corrections section on the Website, it's not by distraction, reader. The impression is that it was designed to not appear.

It is not part of the topics in the bar at the top and, for reasons that escape me, it is not put in alphabetical order in the list of sections (blue tab on the left, at the top). It comes at the end: the list has 41 items, corrections is in 39th place.

The problem with Twitter is completely different.

"The newspaper's policy is to never erase an incorrect tweet or story, but to correct mistakes as quickly as possible with visibility. In our opinion, it is a more transparent procedure than to simply erase the original contents. In this case, readers who follow the old tweet will be taken to the correct story and informed that an earlier version was wrong," the leadership in the newsroom said.

Between these two ways, I believe that the newspaper needs to rethink its procedures. If the intention is to give transparency and visibility to corrections on the Website, it would be more efficient to explain in the same archive that an earlier version of the story had said something incorrectly. It's impossible to be more clear and visible.

I also don't see the logic in maintaining an incorrect teaser on Twitter, where it can continue to be reproduced. In correcting the story about Lula, the newspaper replaced the incorrect information on the Website; why not erase the incorrect tweet and leave another one informing about the error that was removed?

Translated by JOHN WRIGHT

Read the article in the original language