“Whatever the future holds for accuracy and journalism as a whole, it seems certain that the river of errors and corrections will continue to flow for decades to come.”
Jeff Jarvis (2007)

It could be so simple. The journalist works accurately, his texts are wirtten to the best of his knowledge and belief. And if there is something wrong, his colleagues and readers will point that out. The journalist thanks them for the hint, corrects the error and has made the world a little bit “correcter”.

Well. There are doubts about the accuracy in journalism. Texts are produced under time pressure. The fact-checkers are retired, their colleagues are busy and the readers indignant. The journalist is annoyed by the hint, he might correct his error and blames the news business. Although you can hardly find the type of journalist described in the first place, there is something you definitely come by regularly: errors.

It’s these mistakes Corrigo is focused on. Of course, there’s a high degree of professionalism in online journalism and you can find both extremes of the case scenarios described earlier.

Technological change has not only increased the need for quality control – but made it possible in the first place. The internet in general and social media in particular enables all citizens to participate in quality control.

Good News – Bad News

That’s the good news: There are millions of fact checkers out there and you always find somebody who knows it better.

The bad news is: The european research project MediaAcT has shown that many of the established tools of media accountability – including the press councils – fail to systematically involve citizens.

Without the public’s voice, these instruments are too quiet. Only as a common orchestra, supported by the mighty choir of the public, they can be heard.

The Corrigo Orchestra

There are already some pioneering projects like MediaBugs and NewsTrust, which share some of Corrigo’s ideas. While their services vary considerably in function and degree of professionalization, they have one thing in common: they do not reach many people.

And as long as Crowdsourced Media Accountability Services do not achieve critical mass, publishers and media professionals will not have the pressure to diminish the number of errors.

Still: Pressure alone would not lead to less errors and transparency. If the Corrigo orchestra wants to be heard it will need the right “tonality”. This is one of our key findings  after analysing error culture in journalism. Instead of “crowd versus Journalism” Corrigos slogan should be: “Journalism featuring Crowd”.

Corrigo is a Crowdsourced Media Accountability Service that helps its users to flag and correct factual errors, missing links and typos in online news sources. It comes as a browser add-on based on web annotation technology. This makes you see errors and corrections right in the context. To give you a better impression of our idea we produced this screencast:

Strengths

• Corrigo increases the visibility of errors in the direct context of the article.
• Corrigo accelerates the process of reporting and correcting errors and helps to document it.
• Corrigo separates error messages from comment threads and helps editors, to identify them easily.
• Corrigo lives and breathes in the browser.
• Corrigo stops the spreading of errors by marking them in correlated texts.
• Corrigo enables a comparison of the accuracy of online media.

Weaknesses

• New browser versions bring a need for constantly updating the required add-on with them.
• Web annotation systems are barely known and used.
• To sustain further development, communication and technical infrastructure, Corrigo is dependent on funding.
• Up to now: Corrigo is not working in Apps.

Opportunities

• Corrigo is able to establish a more open in dealing with errors and to increase the quality in online media.
• Corrigo has the potential to build a network of existing instruments of Media Accountability.
• Corrigo can be supplemented with additional function, for example, connections to services such as churnalism.com or tineye.com, web services, looking for the origins of texts and images to find unlabeled news releases and stock material.
• Journalists may use Corrigo pro-actively. With the help of Corrigo they could ask the crowd to verify a statement in an interview or a text.
• Via plugins Corrigo can be connected with content management systems, in order to enable an efficient management of errors and corrections within a few clicks.
• As a non-profit open-source project Corrigo can be internationalized and extended functionally.

Threads

• The existing culture of errors can complicate the introduction on the market.
• Despite all methods of quality control within the community: An abuse of technology for can never be excluded.
• Some legal issues are still unclear. Court decisions may change the legal framework to the disadvantage of Corrigo.

For us this is an interesting issue as we do not want to burden editors with even more work. Some of the editors and journalist we talked to feared that Corrigo would ultimately mean more work load – and we take this seriously. Still, we believe Corrigo could be a real enrichment in terms of collaboration between “the users” and the newsroom:

Good collaboration depends on good communication. Having examined the error culture in newsrooms it became clear that journalists have difficulties with admitting errors. That’s nothing special. Nobody likes to say: Sorry, my fault. Because we live in a culture of blame-and-shame. There’s a bit of Nelson in all of us as we love to point a finger on people who made a mistake.

The better way would be to blame the error, not the person who made it. If Corrigo was the place where readers pillory the writers the latter would not accept the new tool and nothing would change.

That’s why Corrigo’s motto is not journalists vs.crowd but it’s journalists ft. crowd.

As we mentioned earlier, “we take the technology of web annotation but limit its use to reporting errors in news articles.” We wish to focus on factual errors. They are “deviations from objective fact” and are therefore called “objective errors” (cf. Blankenburg, 1970:376). By concentrating on those objective errors we leave apart all subjective errors which are subject to numerous debates – which can be continued within the comment threads. This would enable the editor to access reported (factual) errors more quickly.

If someday Corrigo gets really really popular, we will probably have many “potential” errors reported. In order to keep the correction procedure efficient we provide a “traffic light system”. Users who have acquired a certain reputation within Corrigo will have the power to verify errors reported by users with a smaller reputation (e.g. new users). So if there were many errors a day the editor would be able to only concentrate on all red / verified errors.

Last but not least a short note on friday’s lecture. Oliver Reichenstein talked about several web projects his design agency Information Architects had realized over the past years. Among the relaunch of Zeit Online in 2009, which was notably interesting for me. Having worked in Zeit Online’s newsroom as an intern when the “switch was flipped”, it was great to have the designer’s perspective towards it. If you’re interested: Knight-Mozilla learning lab recorded the lecture, and I encourage you to watch it!

Hacks usually fear to dive into the world of hackers. So it was good to have Christian Heilman, a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on HTML5 and John Resig, the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, in the boat. They pushed us into the ocean and showed us what’s under the surface of the water: the fascinating world of the open web.

John Resig gave us some interesting insights in the conception and realization of an open-source software project, which is first and foremost organizing communication and documentation in a smart way. Concerning Corrigo this is going to be a real challenge.

Corrigo is planned to be a tool to control quality in journalism. It’s our democratic conviction that such a tool mustn’t be in the hands of the state or the economy. Since the media as the “fourth force” control the government forces, the state in turn and in the sense of “checks and balances” may have no means of controlling the media. And as quality control of media is too important to be run by enterprises with economic interests it has to be run by the public, which is – going back to the philospher of the Enlightenment John Locke the supervisory of a balanced political system.

This means that while building and coding Corrigo as a non-profit and open-source project it’s important to find a balance between the liberty of the open-source community and the goal of creating a tool which empowers the public to take part in controlling the quality of the media without giving them any chance to abuse this power.

As John Resig made me think about the development of open-source software and let’s say some political or economical aspects of Corrigo, Christian Heilman inspired me to rethink the technical realization of Corrigo. Heilman told us what’s possible with today’s and tomorrow’s browsers. He’s a big fan of applications run by the browser because you don’t have to install software or to update a plugin. At the current state of conception we think that a browser add-on is the only way to realize what we have in mind.

Corrigo shall enable its users to flag and correct errors, missing links and typos in online news sources, so that other users see errors and corrections right in context (to get a better imagination of our intent we recommend to check our presentation on slideshare including some first mock-ups). We think that web annotation is the right technology for that. But is a browser add-on based on web annotation technology the only possibility? After having puzzled a playing music video in my browser we’re not sure anymore. There must be ways we haven’t thought about. So let’s go diving! Share your thoughts with us.

And that’s where Burt Herman steps into our virtual #MozNewsLab classroom. He is a journalist and entrepreneur, he co-founded Storify as well as Hacks/Hackers, an organization and network that brings together journalism and technology. Taking Storify as an example, Burt gave us advice on how to realize our ideas.

By the way: As I already had the chance to work with Storify, I have to say that it’s a smart tool for the kind of journalism, Jeff Jarvis once named process journalism. Due to the fact that “online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect” building a tool which helps journalists picking up tweets, blogposts, videos and photos, to rearrange and to comment on them is a great idea.

But as Jeff Jarvis’ lecture will come soon enough, let’s get back to Burt Herman’s advices. Let’s focus on these: Build a community, build a team and hey, just build it! So far our team consists of two hacks. Now it’s time to find some hackers and Burt Herman encouraged us to do so.

To pick up on Kersten’s thoughts on Aza’s lecture about prototyping, a maker space or a hackathon could be a good start.