For the year 2011, the New York Times published 3,500 corrections, or about nine day, according to public editor Arthur Brisbane’s latest blog post.
Brisbane noted that some corrections — or lack of corrections — have been debated by the Times, the public and himself. As such, Brisbane highlighted a couple of instances in which readers called for corrections that the Times rejected. For example, he noted that readers questioned a Times report in which the Times was accused of having “over-stated” a report on Iran and nuclear weapons.
As Brisbane noted, and we wrote in December, the same topic of Iran and nuclear weapons prompted 1,500 complaints to the Washington Post about that newspaper’s headline and sub-headline suggesting Iran wanted nuclear weapons. (Read our Dec. story on the Washington Post complaint, an advocacy group’s campaign for the correction, and Pexton’s report on the Post’s response here.)
We wrote to Brisbane asking if the Times‘ number of corrections for 2011 includes online corrections, but we were referred to the New York Times’ corporate communications office. We sent the Times’ corporate communications office an e-mail and will update with any response.
We wrote January 1 about three other newspaper’s corrections counts for 2011. The Toronto Star’s public editor Kathy English disclosed that the Canadian newspaper published 366 print corrections in 2011, the Washington Post’s public editor Patrick Pexton reported that the newspaper had 875 print corrections in 2011, and the Kansas City Star’s readers representative Derek Donovan noted that the newspaper had 235 corrections in 2011.
UPDATE: 1/10/2012 12:25 PM EST: Clarified paragraph on the Washington Post complaint. Also, updated lead sentence.