Marty also recently started writing a Quebec-focused blog for Maclean's. Put it in your feeds.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 2,000 points this morning when scientists reported that the earth would soon hit a giant comet and be obliterated.

However, stocks rebounded in the afternoon after the Federal Reserve cut interests rates.

We're all going to die! But at least we'll have access to cheap capital!

(Image credit)

Since this project launched I’ve always said, even if we don’t improve the quality of news (which I hope we do), we re-engage citizens in the news process and this is a benefit to democracy. Democracy rests its fate on engaged citizens - people who consume the news but also go out and make news happen.

The emphasis we put on Pro-Am is about re-engaging people into the news process, so they are introduced to concepts and aspects of our society that they can continue to pursue after the reporting is done. That’s how you create a strong democracy.

In the past news organizations would show people problems in our society in the hopes of spurring action. In truth, however, we probably lost their attention in the first 10 minutes. But instead of showing people, the Pro-Am model engages people. It asks them to tell news organizations what they see, think and feel. That is a call to action and the hope is that it is one that continues after the reporting.

Society as a whole wins when people are encouraged to participate in the news process and are given the means to do so. I tend to focus on how we can get people to take more of a role in detecting and correcting errors, but my micro approach only serves to illustrate that there are so many different ways to bring the public into the news process.

NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks
support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens
can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

Substitute in "the press" for "NASA" and it works just as well. In my upcoming book, I write about the need for the press to be frank and honest about its level of accuracy, and also more honest about correcting and publicizing its errors.
The other post of Monck's that caught my eye had him quoting from a report in The Washington Post about some recent scientific research. From the Post:

...the mind's bias does affect many people, especially
those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who
are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time
and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts...
The research also highlights the disturbing reality
that once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be
difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad
information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce
it.

This is interesting in terms of corrections. I support the idea that a correction should make clear what the initial error was, but is repeating the error a bad idea? I imagine this research doesn't exactly apply to a correction, but the point is interesting. Overall, this passage and the one below show just how hard it can be for the press to do its job of informing the public. Put aside the challenges of newsgathering and verification and there is still an inherent challenge in overcoming the biases hard wired into people's minds. Our brains play some funny tricks on us. More:

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that
are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the
brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are
true.
Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one's
birthday or a pet's name, are indeed true. But someone trying to
manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain
functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes
the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone
who denies it later.
Furthermore, a new experiment by Kimberlee
Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing
the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same
effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain
gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from
multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study was
published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Fascinating stuff. But here's the key conclusion:

...People are not good at keeping track of
which information came from credible sources and which came from less
trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from
the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person
recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated
assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information
more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true, said Schwarz.

7. Stop calling everything “content”.
It’s a bullshit word that the dot-commers started using back in the
’90s as a wrapper for everything that could be digitized and put
online. It’s handy, but it masks and insults the true natures* of
writing, journalism, photography, and the rest of what we still,
blessedly (if adjectivally) call “editorial”. Your job is journalism,
not container cargo.

Searls offers some other great advice about utilizing citizen journalists, forging strong ties with bloggers, and making better use of archives. I disagree with him on the topic of paid content (and Matthew looks at the issue of pay walls here), but the rest is interesting stuff.

And, yeah, I know this blog has been silent for a few months. I got caught up finishing my book, which will be released in November. Look for more content posts here soon.

Austin is now at work on Akoha, his latest tech start-up, and he's also blogging up a storm here. Austin has started doing interviews with folks in the Montreal tech and blogging community and he recently put me in front of the microphone. You can read the interview here. (I sent him one of my new, professional-looking headshots for the interview, but he opted instead for one that features me having way too much fun at a company holiday party from years ago. Damn you, open bar!) Give it a read, and I highly recommend Austin's blog to anyone interested in the technology/entrepreneurship/start-up scene.

The Presstime article:

'There Really Are No Small Errors'

BY MARY LYNN F. JONES

DURING THE LAST 12 months, thousands of errors have slipped into the nation's newspapers. Among the more memorable: a Dallas Morning News column referring to a woman as a socialist, rather than a socialite; a Denver Daily News item that called New Jersey "Jew Jersey"; and a Chicago Tribune photo caption that misidentified tennis star Serena Williams as singer Beyonce Knowles.

"Errors are probably always going to happen," says Craig Silverman, whose blog, Regret the Error (www.regrettheerror.com), has tracked journalistic mistakes since October 2004. "The question is, can you get rid of the real groaners?"

How to keep such errors out of newspapers will be among the topics discussed at the American Copy Editors Society conference April 20-22 in Cleveland.

Kathy Schenck, assistant managing editor for the copy desk at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, says she pauses before letting certain words -- such as corruption, gangster and epidemic -- into the paper. That's because those words "are loaded and are sometimes used inaccurately," says Schenck, who will lead a conference session on critical copyediting.

"It's about thinking about what those words really mean and making sure that the situation calls for using them," adds Schenck, who started a program for her paper's 33 copy editors last fall that focuses on topics such as math, the courts and use of the Internet.

In February, The New York Times launched the "Quarter Hour Project," aimed at giving copy editors an additional 15 minutes to work on each story. Each participating department -- all except for the Week in Review and Book Review sections and The New York Times Magazine -- determined where it could shave off the additional time.

The idea, says Merrill Perlman, director of the paper's 14 copy desks, which include about 160 staffers, is "to give them a little more breathing space to think about the content of a story."

All copy editors "should check error-prone, verifiable facts as time permits," such as spellings of names, titles, phone numbers and street addresses, Perlman says. Other suggestions include looking for internal inconsistencies in a story, as well as "focus errors," like whether a number should be followed by millions or billions.

And, Perlman says, copy editors should "think about what somebody is saying and what you know." For example, visualize the description of a car accident to see if it makes sense. "Follow your instincts," she adds.

Other common mistakes, according to Silverman, involve misidentification (making a man into a woman in a story, for example) and omission (leaving out an important word in a quote). "There really are no small errors," he says.

I also recommend my good friend Jamie O'Meara's funny column about straight guys with gay best friends. Though I have to say the line of the week goes to a reader who posted this comment below Jamie's piece: "This story was great to read knowing that people can be friends despite diversity."

Yes, we all must strive to combat diversity.