This is unusual. Yet very familiar.
Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises Inc. presented its Mid-Year Media Review in New York City on Wednesday, and AP ran a series of articles about the company's results. According to Lee, every one of the six AP stories that AP pushed over the wire on Wednesday contained errors. Errors that AP was unable to correct before they ended up being published and cached in search engines. So, in what Lee acknowledged was an "unusual" move, the company "reluctantly" put out a press release to correct the errors. The release begins:
Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (NYSE: LEE), reluctantly issued this unusual news release today correcting errors in a series of six stories distributed Wednesday by The Associated Press after Lee's presentation to analysts at the Mid-Year Media Review in New York City.
It then proceeds to list all of the items that the company says AP got wrong (too many for us to reprint here). Editor & Publisher has a good story about this dispute. Here's a statement they ran from AP Senior Vice President and
Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll:
"The bureau made some errors in
the coverage and those were corrected in cycle yesterday, both on the
Iowa wire and the national business wire. The Lee spokesman disagreed with the approach to the
story that ran on the national business wire and said so. That's his
prerogative -- plenty of people disagree with news calls, which are by
nature subjective."
We saw two AP corrections yesterday regarding Lee and this is the longer of the two:
In a June 22 story about the financial outlook for Lee Enterprises
Inc., The Associated Press reported erroneously that the company's
acquisition of Pulitzer Inc. will cause earnings to decline 8 cents to
10 cents per share for the rest of 2005. Instead, Lee expects the
decline to occur in its fiscal year 2005, which ends in September.
The AP also reported incorrectly that Lee officials described their
increase in classified revenues as lackluster. In fact, those revenues
were up 5.3 percent in the eight months through May.
The story also implied that revenues for Lee and Pulitzer combined had
risen 5.1 percent overall this year. In fact, that figure represents
the revenues only at Lee.
So, what do we have here? A newspaper publisher is shocked at how incorrect information can be reported and then widely distributed nearly instantly. In order to disseminate what it sees as the correct information, the publisher has to resort to a press release since AP's corrections are seen as inadequate. AP, meanwhile, acknowledges it made a few errors and says that the publisher is merely disagreeing with its take on the information.
The reality is that this kind of thing happens all the time. What makes this unusual is the fact that we have two news organizations going back and forth over the issue of accuracy, with one pointing out the inadequacy of corrections (hallelujah!). The only reason this has become news is the fact that it's one news organization pitted against another. When it's just an average person or company, nobody takes notice.
Here's what a Lee spokesman told E&P: "Once published, this bad information never goes away. It will appear in search engines far beyond our lifetimes." Amen. This underscores our frequent criticism that corrections, as they exist today, fail to ensure that readers receive the correct information. Lee just learned that the hard way.
The question is: will the company apply this newly learned lesson in its newsrooms?