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Well, this is refreshing: Andrew Alexander, Deb Howell’s replacement at the Washington Post OmbudsDesk, reveals fundamental failure in one of the paper’s most frustrating direct interactions with readers. (No, not the paper landing in that puddle on your front stoop or the newsprint rubbing off on your fingers as you read it.) Today, OmbudsAndy tackles the "system" the Washington Post uses to receive, process, manage, verify, and generate Corrections: the place where readers (usually based on their own first-hand experience) alert their newspaper that someone, somewhere, got something about some story wrong.

You may not be surprised to learn that, for readers, it’s "like sending a correction request into a black hole." You may, however, be surprised to learn that this characterization is OmbudsAndy’s.

Hurray! We may have an Ombudsman who advocates for readers. Mr Alexander goes on to document what’s wrong with Corrections:

The newspaper’s process for handling correction requests has not worked properly. In some instances, reporters were never even notified that readers had requested corrections to their stories.

There is little statistical analysis to spot trends in errors or to detect reporters (or editors) with high correction rates. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets fixed.

Accountability is lacking. Reporters and editors can neglect correction requests with little real consequence. Correction rates are not typically raised in performance evaluations.

This is not a system designed to correct errors; this is a system designed to accumulate Correction requests from readers. There’s no real management of Correction requests; nothing needs to happen when a reader submits a Correction. No one is held to account. It’s Potemkin Corrections: "Thank you for playing!"

OmbudsAndy gives away the WaPo’s game in a brilliant paragraph composed almost entirely in the passive voice, revealing this fact about Corrections: No One Is In Charge.

Here’s how the system works: Correction requests — by phone call, letter or e-mail to corrections@washpost.com — are entered into a database. Each day, new requests are routed electronically to the various desks at The Post, including National, Sports, Style, Foreign, Photo and Metro. The reporter who wrote the story and the editor who assigned it are then notified that a correction request is pending. If they think an error has been made, they draft a correction that is sent through top editors before being published.

For a career newspaperman, that paragraph (with no actors except the reporter and the editor, who only "draft a correction") had to be excruciatingly painful to write, but OmbudsAndy uses it to tell us the central story about WaPo Corrections. No One Is In Charge.

After he goads the most frequent offender, the Metro desk, into action (160 Corrections extant, some since 2004!) OmbudsAndy takes a stab at sleekifying Corrections with some bells and whistles. But I’m not sure who he’s writing for, since, well — No One Is In Charge.

There’s much The Post could do to better its performance on corrections. More accountability and vigilance are needed. The database might be tweaked to pester reporters and editors to address correction requests, sort of like a car’s annoying chimes when a seat belt isn’t fastened. Managers’ bonuses might be tied to their handling of correction requests. And correction rates could be made part of all performance evaluations for reporters and editors.

The Post must also figure out how to handle corrections online. Currently, policies at washingtonpost.com mainly address corrections for print stories that appear on the Web site. But what about correcting videos and other forms of online storytelling?

It’s a challenge, but also an opportunity, because the Web offers perhaps the fastest way to correct an error and spread the correction far and wide.

"Replying," new co-managing editor Raju Narisetti lumps WaPo’s brokendown Corrections with sexy shiny new toys like Tweets:

"As new and faster forms of disseminating information become popular — live Tweets from events, for example — we owe it to our audiences to . . . make sure we are delivering fast and accurate information," he said, "and also a way to promptly correct errors."

No, despite The Village’s new fascination with Twitter, this is not about Twitter, sir — it’s about a non-responsive "system" that your predecessors ignored and let fester. Twitter and other shiny new, fast forms won’t heal Corrections: you need to repair something broken at the heart of your reader interaction. As OmbudsAndy said, it’s a black hole. And it’s at the heart of WaPo’s credibility with readers: Can you correct your paper’s errors?

So here’s what we have so far:

Advocacy for readers: check.

Exposure of something fundamentally broken at the paper: check.

Acknowledgment of a management failure: check.

Well-thought-out suggestions to improve the situation: check.

Management’s clueless response: check.

Good Ombudsing, Andy. Keep it up.

photo from mandj98