Media error report service goes national in the US

Error report service MediaBugs announced this week that it has taken its service national in an attempt to improve the transparency of corrections in the press.

MediaBugs, which was awarded a $335,000 grant in 2009 from the Knight News Challenge, originally set up a public test web site in the San Francisco Bay area allowing people to report errors in news reports.

"Based on a system that technology teams use when releasing software, this aggregation process will display trends in errors and show which news organisations are responsible to public questions and comments," its description on the Knight News Challenge site says.

Announcing its expansion across the country on the site's blog this week founder Scott Rosenberg said people often mentioned errors by news outlets based outside their reach.

"We've found that a lot of the exchanges we've had introducing MediaBugs to people went something like this: The listener would say, 'What a great idea! You know, just the other day I saw this really unfortunate error in the X News about Y' - where both X and Y lie outside the Bay Area. And we’d have to say, 'That's really interesting, but unfortunately we are only covering the Bay Area right now.' Everyone would look glum, and the conversation would move on."

"Wherever you are in the US, and wherever in the country you find a media organisation that you think has made a correctable error, MediaBugs is now available for you to use to try to get those errors corrected. You file an error report; we'll make sure the media outlet knows about it, and try to get someone to respond," he added.

Alongside MediaBugs' expansion the site has also undergone several changes, such as a new 'Browse by region' feature and US map.

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