transparency

Baynewser reports that Scott Rosenberg, one of the co-founders of salon.com, just won a $335,000 Knight Foundation grant to build a site called MediaBugs, which will serve as a digital forum for reporting reporter's mistakes.

The goals are interconnected: to provide more transparency in the news biz; and to make journalists more comfortable with mea culpas. The pilot project will start in the SF Bay Area later this year. Stay tuned.

From the post:

"All journalists make mistakes, but they sometimes view admitting errors as a mark of shame," says the project summary. "MediaBugs aims to change this climate, by promoting transparency and providing recognition for those who admit and fix their mistakes. MediaBugs will create a public test web site in a U.S. city for people to report errors in any news report—online or off-line. Comments will be tracked to see if they create a conversation between the reporter and the error submitter, and then show whether corrections or changes resulted."