The Clear Page

Category: Opinion

  • Why We Publish Our Corrections at the Top, Not the Bottom

    Most publications treat corrections like a stain to be scrubbed from view. The fix goes at the very bottom of the page, in smaller type, phrased to minimize the error. The reader who was misled the first time almost never sees it.

    We think this gets the ethics exactly backwards. If a mistake was worth making publicly, the correction is worth making just as publicly.

    The rule we hold ourselves to

    When we get a fact wrong, the correction goes at the top of the article, dated, in plain language, describing what we said and what was actually true. No passive voice, no hiding behind the phrase mistakes were made.

    This costs us something. It is a visible admission that we are not infallible, printed where every future reader will see it. But that cost is the point. A correction that embarrasses the writer is doing its job; a correction designed to be missed is not a correction at all.

    Trust is not built by never being wrong. It is built by being honest about being wrong in a way the reader can actually find. Everything else is public relations wearing the costume of accountability.

    Related: more on media and tech · when an algorithm hides a local business

    Further reading: Journalism ethics and standards

  • The Case Against the Endless Notification

    There is a quiet violence in the modern feed. Not in any single alert, but in the accumulation of them — the sense that to look away for an afternoon is to fall behind, to become uninformed, to fail at the basic civic duty of paying attention.

    This is a lie, and a profitable one. The publications and platforms that push a hundred updates a day are not selling you understanding. They are selling you the anxiety of incompleteness, then charging your attention to soothe it.

    Slow is not the same as ignorant

    We built this publication on the opposite premise. Most stories do not need to reach you in the first ninety seconds. They need to reach you accurately, once, with enough context that you remember them next week.

    Consider what you actually lost the last time you missed a breaking alert. In almost every case: nothing. The story either mattered enough to still be there when you looked, or it did not matter at all.

    We are not asking you to unplug. We are asking you to notice who benefits from your inability to. The answer is rarely you.

    Related: more on media and tech · how search algorithms reshape attention

    Further reading: The attention economy