Correction: Steve Jobs Dies at 56

Just one day after Apple announced its new iPhone 4S and iOS 5 (to widespread criticism, as I mentioned in an earlier journal entry), they had another announcement that brought great disappointment to followers and supporters of their products. Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc., passed way at age 56.



News of Jobs’ death spread fast, in part because he was an icon of American technology. The homepage to The New York Times online (pictured above) featured a larger-than-average headline and photograph of Jobs, which linked to an article that detailed the ways Jobs “led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age”.

When I went to access this Times article again a few days later, I noticed several corrections that were printed at the bottom of the page. Though all of them seemed relatively minor—one was correcting a misprinted date, while another provided the correct location of Jobs’ high school—they did inspire me to think about the differences between corrections in print and online journalism and the way new media is changing the journalism process.

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the Internet and how it’s changing the way that people get their news. But based on the ease with which The New York Times was able to correct its article about Steve Jobs, it is also changing the way that news is produced. Where journalists and news organizations once had to print their corrections to previous stories in their most recent issue, they are now able to implement the change right into the article, with nothing more than a little note at the bottom admitting their mistake. In fact, I could have easily missed the correction notices had I not chosen to scroll further down the page.

While there’s nothing wrong with The New York Times (or any publication) going back and correcting its articles, I was uneasy about how easily and smoothly these changes could be implemented. I think that this speaks to the increased responsibilities of both producers and consumer in the age of Internet journalism: readers should make the effort to determine whether a story they are reading has been corrected, while news organizations should make an corrections and alterations easily known to the consumer. Because the Internet has made it so difficult to determine between fact and fiction, online news needs to be approached with caution by people from both parties.