It’s never going to be a good thing when you have to publish a nine paragraph correction ahead of an article, but the Las Vegas Sun has done just so after admitting ‘several reporting and editing problems as well as some factual errors’ in an article on a teenage shooting.

Part of the problem it seems was the use of online comments from another website to add a racial angle to the piece:

“The problem was that the quotes were anonymous and, because of the way the Web works, could have come from anywhere in the world. Although some people in Summerlin [where the shooting occurred] may hold racist views, these quotes, because of the lack of identity of the writers, in no way proved that possibility.”

The paper has learned its lesson and will be changing editorial policy in the future by not allowing anonymous comments from websites to be used in reporting.