The Daily Mail, along with its sister paper The Mail on Sunday, has recently started to print a corrections and clarifications page.
It’s a pretty half-arsed affair for many reasons. The only way to find it is by searching for it by title. There’s no link for it anywhere on the site and it doesn’t seem to have been given its own section. Most bizarrely, the corrections don’t appear in the main web feed for the paper.
None of the corrections link back to the original story and in many cases you only get a vague description to help you work out which story they are talking about. And even if you work out which story they’re talking about, it’s often impossible to find the story on the web site as it has been removed.
I thought I could probably do better than that. So today I’ve built the Corrections and Clarifications site. It has a list of all of the corrections and clarifications that both papers have published and (where I’ve been able to find it) a link to the original story on the Mail site. I’ve also tagged the corrections so we can hopefully start to build up a picture of the kinds of corrections the Mail is printing.
I’m assuming that the Mail’s approach is so sub-standard because their content management system is prehistoric or because the people who worked on the project didn’t really think it through. If that’s the case then I’m more than happy to try to help them to fix this problem.
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