How to avoid repeating other newspapers’ mistakes
Reporters will know the following situation well.
You’re working on a story and, as part of your research, looking at cuttings from other newspapers in an archive system (like Clipshare) or on the web. In the course of writing the story, you use some of the information to provide context or to explain to the reader why the story is important or timely.
What you won’t know from the cuttings system is whether that story subsequently had a complaint brought against it about the information contained in it or the conduct of the journalist that wrote it. These complaints are available on the websites of the regulatory body of the newspaper and magazine industry, IPSO (as well as its former incarnation, the PCC) but it’s not easy to make the connection, especially when you’re up against deadline and strapped for time.
If you don’t get round to checking previous rulings, and it gets past the eagle eyes of the lawyers, there’s a chance you might repeat information which has been ruled incorrect. This happened to The Sunday Times recently, meaning they had to issue a clarification in the paper and online. This seemed like something we could avoid in future so we used Build The News to work out a way to help journalists find out about relevant rulings in the course of writing a story.
The idea
We came up for Casenote, a system to check copy for legal and regulatory errors in order avoid unnecessary corrections, clarifications, apologies and litigation.
It’s a Google docs add-on which allows the journalist to check for any relevant rulings by clicking a button.
A bit like a spelling or grammar check, this cross references the copy in the document against over 7,000 records in three different databases (IPSO, PCC and the legal warnings of the Times in-house legal team) which we created by scraping the respective websites.
The future
As part of the weekend, we were asked to think about ways that we might develop Casenote in the future and thought it would be useful to add other sets of rulings (e.g. Ofcom sanction adjudications) as well as other jurisdictions for companies that published in different countries.
We were really pleased to be jointly given the staff prize alongside Inform, a personal trainer for your news diet, fighting off stiff competition from the Wall Street Journal’s Jargon Buster and Tapdat, a fun second screen voting system. Each of the teams will post about their ideas this week.
We intend to open source Casenote to allow other news organisations to use it and we think it could be useful independent student publications who often don’t have legal teams and have to rely on a copy of McNae’s. We’d also like to create plugins for Word and WordPress for news organisations that use them. If you have any ideas about how it could be improved, we’d love to hear from you.
Casenote was one of the projects created by staff from The Times and The Sunday Times staff at Build The News, an events for students journalists, designers and developers held at the News UK building in London. You can see some of the other projects from the weekend here.
