Somewhere on every news site you'll find a notice extolling the publisher's commitment to accuracy: Corrections are welcome and errors are promptly fixed, it says, in so many words. Sounds swell. But if publishers were as welcoming and as prompt as they say they are, why would Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg and Knight News Challenge panelists see so much opportunity in a news corrections clearinghouse?

The Knight Foundation gave Rosenberg's startup MediaBugs $335,000 to solve a problem news organizations should be handling themselves. Currently focused on the San Francisco media market but planning an expansion in the coming weeks, MediaBugs solicits "specific, correctable errors" from news consumers, communicates what it sees as actionable mistakes to the organizations that published them and chronicles the entire process on its website.

Now, by filtering error reports, compiling corrections data, sharing widgets and source code and advocating for civil correspondence among stakeholders, MediaBugs does more than just pass along complaints from users to publishers. But passing complaints from users to publishers is its main gig. (MediaBugs, for the record, deals with all mediums, print, broadcast and online.)

Why can't news orgs do this themselves?

Why do I feel like "The Bobs" in Office Space? You know the scene. The one where the two same-name consultants interrogated Tom Smykowski over why Initech needed him to take specifications from customers. Why, they demanded, couldn't the engineers just do it themselves?

Well, why can't news organizations properly process error complaints themselves? (The answer is kind of like Tom's answer: News orgs, like Initech's engineers, in a sense, exhibit poor people skills.)

While MediaBugs' streamlined system makes managing corrections more efficient, technology is not the fundamental barrier here. There's no reason a newsroom committed to the task can't effectively execute it with a simple PHP interface or with a dedicated e-mail account with a few customized rules and folders.

The fundamental barrier is an uptight, insular culture that resists the kind of transparency it demands of others. This doesn't describe all news organizations, of course, but judging by the attention MediaBugs has received and its accounts of its interactions with media outlets, it describes too many of them.

Institutionalism's unintended consequences

Ironically, the institutional framework that some news organizations claim makes them more accountable than some dude blogging from his bedroom (hey, that's me!), can in fact make them less accountable. A former Bloomberg journalist, for example, suggested to MediaBugs that the business news service's "personnel policies came down so hard on employees who made errors that they were reluctant to admit them at all."

While the opportunity to improve the quality of their journalism should alone be enough to move news organizations toward an as-open-as-possible culture, there are plenty of other incentives.

Truly welcoming, truly prompt attention to user feedback humanizes journalists and the journalistic process. It shows sources and audience members that, no matter what their paranoid fantasies tell them, journalists don't willfully publish lies to settle personal vendettas or to serve some centralized media agenda. It shows that journalists in fact hate, hate, hate making mistakes, even comparatively minor ones that sources are content to laugh off.

A direct line to the coveted engaged user

Moreover, a responsive error management system puts news organizations directly in touch with the most coveted kind of user: An engaged one. Think about it: Someone who reports a mistake was not only paying close enough attention to notice it but also cared enough to tell the media outlet about it.

He or she might have some other thoughts the news organization would be interested in hearing, thoughts he or she might not mention to third parties like MediaBugs or thoughts such third parties, unfamiliar with the outlet's brand and coverage area, might misinterpret or dismiss as unimportant.

Whether it's part of their official job description or not, today, all journalists are in the customer service business. They all serve the communities they report on. New tools make it both harder to hide from this responsibility and easier to fulfill it.

We welcome your feedback!

Again, I realize there must be many news organizations who do an exemplary job managing corrections online, and I'd love to highlight some of them in a future post. So, let us know: What outlets do corrections well?

Oh, to report an error in this post or in any others of ours, e-mail us, @ reply or DM us on Twitter or let us know in the comments. We welcome corrections and will fix errors fast, promise.

This is the second of two posts on the new TBD.com In yesterday's post, we detailed how TBD is embracing true two-way interactivity to produce better journalism.

TBD General Manager Jim Brady told a Poynter chat audience Monday that TBD has "ideas backed up on the runway like LaGuardia Airport." Given the many observers offering advice to the new site, the figurative backup now probably stretches into the Queens streets. That won't stop us from adding to it.

For starters, we agree with the tweeter who implored, "I was kind of ticked that @tbd doesn't yet beam GPS-coded info right into my brain. They've had time." We'll assume TBD is on that. It's probably just awaiting approval from the giant app store in the sky. In the meantime, here are some other ideas we think TBD should pursue:

• We see that each of the stories posted on the site has a small, gray line of text, indicating the source of the story. We'd like to see a color-coded system, which could simply mean stories from TBD are red and those from other news sources are gray. This might help people know better that when they click a link, they will be taken off site.

• We want a better explanation of the features available on TBD. Certainly, this site isn't your typical news site, so we'd love to see a How to Take Advantage of TBD section.

  A subsection for former WJLA.com and News8.net visitors — the TV stations' sites started redirecting to TBD.com when the new site went live — detailing what's happened to their favorite features should be part of this guide. Several users identifying themselves as loyal WJLA.com visitors complained to TBD community hosts about the new format in a TBD-hosted launch-day chat, some threatening to take their business to rival news sites.

  The hosts were receptive to users' suggestions to create a "Here's what's changed" page like the one we are advocating and to reconsider the decision not to carry live streaming of WJLA programming. Whether or not TBD takes those steps, some former WJLA.com visitors are likely to leave anyway. Like we already said, TBD.com isn't a traditional news site — that was kinda the point — and some more traditional users aren't going to like it now matter what TBD says or does.

  But to those open to change, just a little ruffled by it, judging from users' chat comments, TBD could have made things easier on itself by better preparing users for the switch. In TBD's defense, notices were posted on the old sites and the stations ran on-air teasers, though this one from June probably inspired more questions than it answered. But reports from users that they thought WJLA.com had been hacked and that "I don't know anything about TBD," suggest TBD could have done more, assuming these users are as loyal as they claimed to be.

• Since aggregation is such a big part of what it does, TBD should look for ways to make the articles it links to on other sites more searchable. Based on a few test searches, TBD's internal search engine seems to pick up the ledes/summary grafs for external articles, but not copy farther down in the story. For example, searches for proper names contained in articles' bodies returned no results.

  Now, users can easily work around this by searching Google in the corner of their browser or in another tab. And, especially since there's a readily available alternative, it's worth noting that TBD is building a news site, not a search engine. But, if searches of linked content's full text — a feature available to all Blogger bloggers — can be achieved without overwhelming in-house developers or through affordable third-party help, it's something worth exploring.

• There seems to be inconsistent use of tagging for stories. We'd love to see this feature taken full advantage of as an easy way to provide ongoing context for stories, create different topic pages, and allow users to easily dive farther into content they're interested in.

• A nifty — if difficult to execute — idea to come out of the Poynter chat: A Pandora-like feature that lets users jettison articles they don't care for from TBD's vertical news streams and have them replaced by ones an algorithim thinks they'll have a better chance of liking.

  "Good idea, but something that's not as easy it sounds," was Brady's response. "That requires a significant amount of pre-planned headlines and blurbs. If you keep clicking "x," we need to keep giving you new headlines." Good point. To make it a bit easier, how about by the 20th click or so Onion-like articles start popping up, like "Local news consumer impossible to please"

• We do love the events page on TBD, especially the visual appeal of it. How does one submit an event for consideration though? It seems like a simple form could be created to accomplish this, and once staff looked over the event information, it could be published.

• Similar to the events page suggestion, it seems news organizations could capitalize on the ease of submitting digital photos of weddings, anniversaries and other important life events. This might be too "local" for TBD and its large coverage area, but it could be a traffic booster. Newspapers use to be the place to see all these things, and to some degree, social networks have filled the gap where online publications have failed. However, what if a news org could do it better? Maybe it's taking advantage of where people already might publish these photos. TBD could give users an option to publish certain Facebook or Flickr photo albums on its site.

We haven't scanned and analyzed every square-inch of TBD, but we hope these ideas help the staff there, as well as other news organizations looking to push the industry forward. And by all means, if you have more ideas, add them in the comments below or simply contact TBD and its staff. We're sure they're listening and they don't seem to mind a busy runway.

This is the first of two posts on the new TBD.com. In the second post tomorrow, we'll offer our suggestions for improving the highly-anticipated site.

Yesterday a call to action for the next-generation news organization reverberated from an Arlington, Virginia, office tower one post, comment and tweet at a time: Ask not only what you can do for your audience, but also what your audience can do for you. 

There are plenty of other reasons to be excited about the launch of D.C. area local news site TBD.com, and plenty of people are talking about them. But what has our attention is TBD's embrace of true two-way interactivity — not just to engage users but to produce better journalism.

I'll point to some specific ways TBD is doing this in a moment. But that it's doing any of these things is owed to a culture, a culture many still consider radical, a culture not easily captured by a link, screengrab or embed.

A D.C. region native currently looking for digital journalism work in the area after reporting and copy editing there, I, like many others in the area and industry, have been closely following TBD's development ever since parent company Allbritton Communications' plans for a new local news website were first disclosed last October.

All along — from executives' first public comments about the site, to the genesis of TBD's community blog network to yesterday's seven-hour chat between the site's staff and users — the words, and now, actions, from TBD and its ambassadors have reflected the core mission: Empower the communities it covers to help it help them. It's embedded in the TBD brand, even though the brand is officially just one day old, and it's exemplified by the site's name: TBD stands for To Be Determined, as in, "No story is complete until users get their say."

Here are five ways that culture is manifesting itself on the day-old site:

1. Complete This Story

The feature produced early results, according to Rowan, putting reporter Sarah Larimer in touch with a user who thought a recent conversation he or she had with D.C. mayoral candidate Vince Gray revealed something not covered in the reporter's article. From there, Rowan wrote, "It's up to Sarah how she'd like to proceed. She can talk to the person further and intergrate that info into her story, or hold the information. She may choose to contact the person down the road for further explanation."

2. Clear, prominent corrections

3. The Facts Machine

4. Creating and curating conversation

TBD is active on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, maintains a blog community, socializes in its physical community, regularly responds to user comments and participates in online chats like the seven-hour marathon yesterday on its own site and another hourlong one on Poynter.org. A lot of this is done by the six-member community engagement team overseen by Steve Buttry, but, Buttry wrote in the Poynter chat, "We expect all the staff to engage with the community."

Showing customers — and this goes for any business — that real people are listening to what they have to say vastly increases customers' motivation to interact with a brand. In TBD's case, this pays dividends in many ways, including news tips. It also, Buttry told chat participants, creates journalism — or at least the seeds of it — where none previously existed. "I think, by hosting, stimulating and curating community conversation, we generate new content," Buttry wrote. For example, Buttry said people who had been thinking about blogging have told him the opportunity to join the TBD network pushed them to finally get started.

5. Mobile ready

TBD made it a priority to have a robust mobile presence out of the gate. "I'm a huge believer that mobile is going to be a financial boon for local sites. Not today, but soon," General Manager Jim Brady wrote in the Poynter chat. TBD's Android app, which I test drove last night, is in the Android Market now. The site's iPhone app (awaiting Apple approval) and mobile-optimized website should each be ready soon.

Being active on this fast-growing third platform — TBD is also on broadcast (WJLA) and cable (the former NewsChannel 8) television, another strategic plus as the Web and TV merge — is a must for any news outlet that doesn't want to play catch up again two decades after the industry all but slept through the birth of the World Wide Web. In the meantime, even if mobile content is not making money yet, it is promoting further loyalty and engagement.

Most important to the focus of this post, TBD's mobile presence encourages and streamlines the collection of user-generated content, which, when it comes to breaking news, means content TBD otherwise probably wouldn't get. Except in rare circumstances, a would-be citizen journalist with a camera-enabled smart phone is going to beat professional reporters to a breaking news scene, especially professional reporters from TBD, because, well, there's only a dozen or so of them. "Submit Tip," is one of four tabs in the TBD Android app's "News" view (the other views are Weather, Metrorail, Traffic and MyTBD). Clicking on the tab calls up a short, self-explanatory form that includes the option to attach a photo or video.

Reaching 'audience actualization'

The infrastructure is there. But just because you build it, is no guarantee they'll come. For everything talked about above to produce better journalism requires:

• An audience
• An audience aware of participation opportunities
• An audience motivated to participate
• An audience educated on how to participate effectively
• An audience that finds participating rewarding enough to participate again

Fortunately, a lot of what I mentioned directly addresses these needs:

• The cross-promotion opportunities with TBD.com's blog partners and sister D.C. area properties — in addition to the two TV stations, Allbritton also owns news superbrand Politico — help attract eyeballs.
• Engaging users on social networks they're already using shows them (here, like in reporting, even better than telling them): "Here's a brand you can interact with!" 
• Giving users some real responsibility — like helping add to and fact check articles — is a strong motivator, as is building a brand with some buzz and personality behind it.
• Chats where users can ask direct questions and a blog focused on community participation teach users about their role.
• Seeing their tips put to good use is reward enough for many. The psychic income that comes with recognition for their contribution gives others the added incentive they need to become repeat participators

There is no silver bullet, however. And TBD, though closer than a lot of outlets, is far from having all of this figured out. We'll present some of our suggestions for it in our next post. The thing about innovation is that it's new to everyone, even the innovators. Reaching audience actualization, if you will, will require hard work. More than anything, perhaps, it will require practicing the patience the site's name implies, accepting that everything's To Be Determined.