BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here's a 900 year old poem about mistakes: THE MOVING FINGER WRITES, AND HAVING WRIT, MOVES ON. NOR ALL YOUR PIETY NOR WIT CAN LURE IT BACK TO CANCEL HALF A LINE NOR ALL YOUR TEARS WASH OUT A WORD OF IT. For centuries it was not possible to go back and fix something that you'd put on paper and sent out -- you could only amend it later with a correction. But what about when there is no paper? What about the internet? Newspapers now exist in perpetuity on line, and there are papers that dispense with paper all together like Slate.com. So a news organization can, for future generations anyway, pretend that it never screwed up in the first place. We thought we'd review the correction policies of both old and new media. Jacob Weisberg I the editor of Slate, and he joins us now. Jacob, welcome back to OTM.

JACOB WEISBERG: Thanks for having me on, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tell me about Slate's policy.

JACOB WEISBERG:Well our policy I would say is in development on this issue right now. It's a, it's a very interesting question. There are really two ways I think you can handle corrections on line. One is to go back and fix the mistake but still issue a correction and explain what your mistake was. The other way is to not take advantage of that opportunity that you have on line and simply leave the mistake but have a correction at the end of the piece and on a corrections page, using the analogy of a print publication like a newspaper that prints corrections after the fact.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But even newspapers are sometimes a little spotty on this issue. We have an example from the New York Times recently that actually led us to look into this issue! Last week it ran a story about rebuilding at the World Trade Center and it had this headline: Goal Is to Lay Cornerstone at Ground Zero during GOP Convention. But the next day the paper ran a correction saying that the article had, quote, "misstated the goal of development officials in setting the accelerated building schedule," and on the paper's web site the headline changed and there was no mention of the convention at all and no mention that the convention had ever been mentioned! It was cleansed, then, of the political implication. And we thought that was a little bit unsavory!

JACOB WEISBERG:Yes. That's the one thing you quite clearly should not do. Now whether that was oversight or, or some sort of policy they have, I couldn't tell you, but you should not fix the mistake and pretend the mistake never existed. Your process of correcting a mistake has to be intellectually honest and it has to be transparent to some extent for readers. The real issue is whether you have to perpetuate the mistake as well as acknowledging it, and in fairness to the Times, I think this is really a new possibility that's opened up by the internet and a lot of people haven't really figured out their policy for correcting mistakes on line.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I know that you've been developing this policy for quite some time, and before the Jayson Blair scandal exploded. But has that given it a little more urgency do you think?

JACOB WEISBERG:That did give me a push, and our first stab at it -- many people feel that it over-corrects, because we actually issue a correction in three separate places -- bracketed following the mistake in the text of a piece; at the end of a piece; and on a separate page. And I think that may err in the direction of excess.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:There was a time not that long ago when if there was a mistake in Slate and a reader wrote in about it and you discovered it, you'd just go ahead and change it without acknowledging the change, right?

JACOB WEISBERG:That was never our policy. Our policy was always to acknowledge mistakes. Now there's a little bit of a gray area if the writer or an editor catches the mistake shortly after a piece goes up and the mistake is of no great significance like the spelling of someone's name or a number that's transposed. We have and I think probably will continue to make very minor corrections like that -- but that's if we catch them quickly ourselves. If a reader has to point it out to you, if the mistake's there for any significant period of time, I think it's important to at the very least acknowledge that you made the mistake, even if the policy is to repair it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Do you think there's something about the inter-activity of the internet that makes these stories more likely? You have a much closer dialogue with your readers than most print publications do.

JACOB WEISBERG:Oh, absolutely. I think mistakes are much more likely to be caught and much more likely to be pointed out, because all someone reading the story has to do is click another button and send you an e-mail complaining about it. They can also check it much more easily. When I'm sitting at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, I don't necessarily have a dictionary handy to see if someone's name or a word is misspelled. On line you just go to a search engine or an on-line dictionary and you can document the error instanteously and prove it was wrong and tell the author about it all within 35 seconds.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right! Jacob, thank you very much!

JACOB WEISBERG: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate.com. We did speak with the New York Times and they told us that in addition to posting corrections on line as they appear in the paper, the Times does go back and correct the original article -- if that article is less than a week old and is still available for free on the web site. As for that article about development at Ground Zero, we were told that the Times made a quote "technical error" when it changed the original story without posting the correction on line. The correction has since been posted on that paper's web site.