Here’s a great example of how the open culture and format of blogs can make journalism better.
The Carrboro Citizen recently ran a story about growth in Chatham and Orange Counties. While reading it, I thought the author wrote “Chapel Hill North” when she was in fact referring to “Carolina North.” Another reader noticed that while the raw numbers were correct, some of the percentages were off.
The editor and author gratefully noted the corrections and changed the story (at least the online version).
Editor | 14-May-07 at 8:50 am
Thanks. Fixed the Carolina North reference. Good golly.
I’ll check on the growth rate. I imagine it is an annual number.kmr
Susie | 14-May-07 at 9:27 am
I checked the numbers and 1.5% is actually the projected annual growth rate for Chapel Hill’s population — the increase from 2005 to 2035 (from 52,394 to 81,297) is estimated at 55%, according to Triangle JCOG projections.
The Chatham County employment increase is also incorrect — 0.7% is the annual growth rate, 24% is the projected increase over the 30 year period.
Thanks for pointing this out. I’ve corrected the information in the story, and I’ll be sure to keep my numbers straight next time.
yeah it seems like this relationship is one of the fundamental benefits of an read/write model: the sanity check.
The OReilly Book “Open SOurces” has an essay (cant remember which one) that talks about the various ways that people are involved in open source projects: At the core are a few developers, and then there is a massive outer ring of people who just report bugs.
Cool to see how just a simple thing like open comments can start to take advantage of this network effect.