Comments on: How should MediaBugs handle reports about grammar, spelling, and writing?

By: Lora Kolodny

Lora Kolodny — Sat, 15 May 2010 02:31:50 +0000

Hear hear JB! A separate section or even site, maybe a partnership with another blog that’s already strong on style and grammar (and hopefully, advancing literacy and language education) makes sense to me. Like Language Log?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

By: JB

JB — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:05:53 +0000

I agree that Media Bugs is most useful as a clearing house for real factual errors. However, if people continue to report significant numbers of grammatical errors, I would consider finding a home for them on the site. Perhaps you could treat them in a more fun, lighthearted way, in a place distinct from the real error reports. You could try it and ditch it if it doesn’t work out.

Not sure what kind of reporting numbers you’re seeing early. But I imagine that grammatical errors are naturally easier for people to spot. They’re sort of a low-hanging fruit for your error-reporting users. If you can find an appropriate way to manage grammatical errors on the site, maybe you’ll better engage the early users that are reporting them. They’ll become stronger advocates for the site.

Nobody uses a new service in exactly the ways its creators anticipate. Adapting to actual usage patterns rather than desired user patterns is often a key to success.

By: Anon

Anon — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:21:32 +0000

Please, factual errors only. I mean, one of the bug reports takes issue with a single inelegant word choice in a college newspaper article, written by a freshman. Who cares?

By: Craig Silverman

Craig Silverman — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:54:36 +0000

I agree with Lora. MediaBugs should focus on factual errors. Of course, typos or poor grammar can result in factual errors — but a misplaced comma or inelegant sentence isn’t the kind of thing this project should focus on, IMO.

By: Lora Kolodny

Lora Kolodny — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:43:48 +0000

As a journalist who started during the advent of online news, I would value MediaBugs more for dealing strictly with facts, not grammar and word choice. If there is an exceptional grammatical error in the news that leads to profound factual misunderstanding, that might be a worthwhile error to address, here. But at least, I’d hope Media Bugs would create some sort of filter for correctable errors in the grammar category, and just ignore gripes about word choice that are a matter of opinion. Keep facts and discussion about them front and center, please. Let the grammarians go and occupy or gripe to sites meant to serve the purpose of advancing good style, syntax and the like. And let MediaBugs serve the purpose of advancing new journalism so that it can be thought of as good journalism itself, not just the stepchild of legacy, investigative and feature writers or producers who mattered.