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Key links:
Primary website:
mediabugs.org
Primary Twitter:
@media_bugs

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

MediaBugs is a service that facilitates the discovery and correction of factual errors and other problems in media coverage.

MediaBugs is funded by the Knight Foundation by way of the Knight News Challenge, which awarded the project $335,000 in 2009. MediaBugs is directed by Scott Rosenberg, an author and a co-founder of Salon, along with former Salon editor Mark Follman.

Some of the project’s goals include giving the public tools to report errors and problems they find in media coverage, across print, broadcast, and the web; helping to get those errors corrected by way of a “civil, productive discussion of them between journalists and the public”; helping journalists by organizing and filtering the reporting of errors; tracking data on errors and corrections for public use; and improving communication between the media and the public in hopes of giving the public more confidence in the news.

In April 2010, the MediaBugs project launched its website in public beta, with an initially tight focus on error correction among the media outlets of the San Francisco Bay Area. In October of that year, as part of a broader site redesign, MediaBugs extended its purview to include a more national focus.

Video:

A 2009 Knight Foundation interview with Rosenberg:

A 2009 Lab video with Rosenberg about the web-development philosophy of MediaBugs:

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Sept. 6, 2012 / Justin Ellis
What we know now: Reevaluating the 2009 Knight News Challenge — Some projects, like DocumentCloud and Ushahidi, were widely adopted in the media. Others stumbled due to technical problems or resistance from partners....
Oct. 27, 2010 / Megan Garber
MediaBugs revamps its site with a new national focus — When it launched in public beta earlier this year, MediaBugs, Scott Rosenberg‘s Knight News Challenge-winning fact-checking project, was focused on correcting errors found in publications in the Bay Area. Today, th...
April 23, 2010 / Mark Coddington
This Week in Review: Facebook’s big move, the iPad’s news app control, and a future for hard reporting — [Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] Facebook tries to connect the web: Most of the talk on journalism and the web th...
April 20, 2010 / Megan Garber
MediaBugs, the Knight-funded error tracker, launches its public beta — Have you ever come across an obvious error in a piece of journalism, only to feel you had no way to fix it? Then today’s your day: MediaBugs, Scott Rosenberg‘s Knight News Challenge-winning project, has just ...
June 23, 2009 / Zachary M. Seward
MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers — On their weekly podcast last month, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer blended their backgrounds to propose a new way of conceiving errors in the news media. Corrections, they argued, should be ...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Megan Garber. Main text last updated: May 31, 2011.
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The Ann Arbor News is a formerly daily newspaper in Michigan that was turned into a local news website called AnnArbor.com from 2009 to 2013. The News, now published twice a week, was closed as a daily newspaper by the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications newspaper chain in July 2009. It was reborn the next day as AnnArbor.com with a…

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Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
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