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Chronicle online corrections policy altered slightly

I wrote some time ago about how the Chronicle handles corrections on its website, and since things have changed a bit, I thought I’d provide an update.

Previously, we would mark passages in the text that had been deleted with a strikethrough effect and passages that had been added by underlining them. Further, deleted text was colored red and inserted text was colored green.

While I think that this was the best and most transparent system for making sure people understood corrections online, it proved unworkable in reality. The corrections took too long for the tastes of the other editors, who also lacked the HTML skill to make the changes easily.

So, we have changed the policy so that we will make unmarked changes in the body of stories when necessary, always carefully noting the changes with an editor’s note at the top of the page. Then, each story is given a special tag which marks it as a “corrected” story. These corrected stories are then listed on our News page and sent automatically to Twitter.

Let me know if there’s anything else we can do to make the corrections clearer or easier to find.