Newspaper Errors: Reporters Dispute Most Source Claims
Research on newspaper accuracy has shown that news sources contend that about half the newspaper articles citing them contain at least one mistake^—usually a misquote, omission or distorted emphasis. But, most ofthe half dozen studies which examined errors in newspapers excluded the reporter from the analysis, concentrating almost entirely on the perceptions of news sources. One study which did look at reporter response found that a reporter's focusing on a particular element of a story, considered an "extremely newsworthy angle" by the reporter, can be considered an error of overemphasis by the source.^ Reporter-source disagreement over such things as story angle and even whether the reporter considers a source-perceived error to actually be an error has been neglected in past research. This investigation was designed to look at reporter perceptions of error, as well as source perceptions, and to determine some of the causes of error in newspaper stories. The study examines whether error varies by reporter experience, by deadline, and by type of content or length. Although reporter views are generally not known, the number of stories containing error, according to sources in five major source accuracy studies dating from the 1930s, ranges from 40% to 60% of all locally produced news items.^ The perceived rate of error in these five studies ranges from three to six mistakes in every four stories. Between half and two-thirds of these sourceperceived errors are judgmental determinations, depending on how misquotes are classified. Berry* listed subjective errors as including omissions, distortions of
Accuracy Matters: A Cross-Market Assessment of Newspaper Error and Credibility
A survey of 4,800 news sources cited in fourteen newspapers provides a cross-market assessment of newspaper accuracy and the effect of errors on newspaper credibility. Sources found errors in 61% of local news and feature stories, an inaccuracy rate among the highest reported in nearly seventy years of accuracy research. Newspaper credibility, as perceived by news sources, significantly declined in relation to frequency and severity of errors. Inaccuracy negatively affected source willingness to cooperate with the press. Subjective errors were considered most egregious, suggesting that how a story is conveyed is at least as important as getting the facts straight.
Ocean predictive skill assessments in the South Atlantic: Crowd-sourcing of student-based discovery
Autonomous Underwater Gliders have over a decade long history of successful regional deployments serving scientific, societal and security needs in application areas ranging from pole to pole and including the full range of water depths from shallow coastal seas to the deep ocean. Glider deployments covering the basin scale are much fewer, but are a growing capacity as demonstrated by the Woods Hole to Bermuda line that crosses the Gulf Stream, the Atlantic Crossing line that follows the Gulf Stream, and the basin circling flights now being conducted as part of the Challenger Glider Mission. The next step in the evolution of the global Challenger mission is to enable an ensemble of modelers from different institutions and agencies to participate in a meaningful way. This process with be formalized in 2014 by leveraging the data management tools of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the education tools of the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Ocean Observing Initiative (OOI). The Education Visualization (EV) tools developed by the OOI's Education and Public Engagement (EPE) Implementing Organization (IO) are currently being configured through the cyber OOI net to display real time OOI glider data with intuitive interactive browser-based tools, reducing the barriers for student participation in sea exploration and discovery. Through U.S. IOOS, forecast ocean data will be harvested from the ephemeral ocean snapshots produced by an ensemble of ocean models along the same glider tracks as Challenger. The parallel observed and forecast datasets, both evolving in real time, will be accessible through the same OOI EV tools, enabling student participation in a crowd-sourced ocean predictive skill experiment. The result will satisfy one of the important goals of the Challenger mission by enabling students to assess of the quality of the ensemble of available global scale ocean models. Student research team projects that use the new model data comparison capabilities will be conducted during the summer of 2014. Students will compare an ensemble of the global ocean models along the high velocity transport pathways by gliders on basin-scale missions, such as one that traverses the northern side of the South Atlantic gyre along the Brazilian shelfbreak. The lasting impact of the Challenger mission will be a global fleet available to respond to events, an assessment of the ocean models along the fastest ocean transport pathways, and the establishment of a network of gliderports for global response.