Tag Archives: Craig Silverman

Regret the Error editor starts business column

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Craig Silverman, editor of Regret the Error, a website which reports on inaccuracies and corrections in the press, has started a fortnightly column for the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism.

Silverman, who already writes a weekly column for the Columbia Journalism Review, told Journalism.co.uk he would be seeking advice from business journalists and editors to inform parts of the ‘Regret the Business Error’ column.

I’m hoping that the column will be a place where business journalists can turn to receive actionable advice for avoiding basic factual errors, and where they can learn about avoiding some of the common mistakes made in business reporting. So it will be a mix of general tips and very specific guidance that works best for business journalists.

In order to do that, I’m going to track down business editors and reporters and do my best to pump them for information and advice.

Anyone who has a tip or piece of advice they would like to share can contact Craig by email – craig [at] craigsilverman.ca

Columbia Journalism Review: The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook

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The excellent Craig Silverman has written a short guide to avoiding and detecting plagiarism and fabrication for the Columbia Journalism Review. To his knowledge no-one has yet written a “definitive guide,” he says.

Among the tips:

Use a different font and text color for your research files. This will help you instantly recognize other people’s words when you paste them into your story. (Many people have suggested this over the years. It works.)

The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook at this link…

(via StinkyJournalism.org)

Essential journalism links for students

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This list is doing the rounds under the headline 100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.

The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.

In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:

And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:

Organisations

  • Crikey.com: news from down under that’s not Murdoch, or Fairfax produced.
  • Press Review Blog (a Media Standards Trust project) – it’s a newbie, but already in the favourites.
  • StinkyJournalism: it’s passionate and has produced many high-profile stories

Individuals

  • CurryBet – Martin Belam’s links are canny, and provocative and break down the division between tech and journalism.
  • Malcolm Coles – for SEO tips and off-the-beaten track spottings.
  • Dave Lee – facilitating conversations journalists could never have had in the days before blogs.
  • Marc Vallee – photography freedom issues from the protest frontline.
  • FleetStreetBlues: an anonymous industry insider with jobs, witty titbits and a healthy dose of online cynicism.
  • Sarah Hartley previously as above, now with more online strategy thrown in.
  • Charles Arthur – for lively debate on PR strategy, among other things

Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. This article contains information collected thanks to the support of Järviwiki.fi . Many thanks to information center i for their valuable help in collecting the data for this article. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.

Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.

Andy Dickinson: Checklist for online journalism

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We like a list at Journalism.co.uk and following on from Craig Silverman’s checklist to reduce reporting errors is Andy Dickinson’s ‘process and content checklist’.

The list encourages journalists to record online research, postcodes, key players in the story, key times and dates – all with an aim for potential multimedia storytelling. e.g. if there are more than four or five dates the story might lend itself to a timeline, suggests Dickinson.

“This may seem a little too systematic for some but I’d be interested in what you think of the idea as an aide memoir to kick start more online thinking earlier in the reporting process,” he writes in a blog post.

Don’t Regret The Error: a journalist’s checklist

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To promote his new book, Regret The Error’s Craig Silverman has come up with a handy checklist all reporters should use when research/writing/publishing a story.

The free-to-download list ranges from the very standard (checking the spelling of people/place names etc) to more web-focused checkpoints (check URLs are working, save links from research).

“Checklists help reporters and editors increase their level of accuracy (…) Seriously, it’s one of the easiest things a journalist can do to prevent factual errors,” adds Silverman.