Metro, the largest daily in the world outside Japan according to themselves, have decided to launch a daily correction column. Corrections in Swedish papers are normally few and not in a fixed column, rather they are published where the original article was published. This is often explained with a worry about the paper’s credibility if corrections were given too much space. The tradition in the US and UK is quite the opposite and Metro in Sweden now welcome feedback from readers so that mistakes can be corrected in “Dagens fel” (“Today’s errors”).
Editor-in-chief, Sakari Pitkänen about the previous practice:
“It is an oldfashioned way of reasoning. It was probably ok before the internet. Today the correct information is spread on blogs, mailing lists and media watchdogs on the web. There is a risk that the reader might find the correction to a mistake everywhere but in the paper that published it. That would really undermine the credibility of the paper.”