NYT didn’t fully fact check their front page story.
They just aggregated content from local papers and classified a murder victim as dying of COVID.
Importantly, the public then attempted to reproduce the reporting. And found an error by the 6th name. 🧵
But it does point to an important difference between open source and closed source journalism.
It’s less trustworthy if the public can’t reproduce the reporting.
Scientists at least publish their methodology & in theory encourage independent replication. Yet many papers don’t replicate.
How much worse is the replication crisis in closed source journalism?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicati…
Open source journalism means linking to public tweets as quotes, linking to primary sources on (eg) Document Cloud, and allowing public to confirm facts.
Rather than treating corrections as humiliations and marketing NYT as the TRUTH, an alternative is to encourage corrections as pull requests and embrace a model of iterative truth.