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posted by janrinok on Saturday May 23 2015, @06:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the mea-culpa dept.

Janrinok writes:

Apology To Microsoft

On Friday, we published a story, submitted by sigma, alleging that Microsoft had attempted to blackmail the UK Government in order to prevent the adoption of UK policy supporting open document standards. Having looked more closely at the linked material provided, the word blackmail is not used but appears only in the submission that we received. As the editor of that particular story I am personally responsible for not having checked the sources sufficiently well and for subsequently releasing the story. I wish to apologise, publicly and unreservedly, for any suggestion that Microsoft attempted to blackmail the UK government. They did not, nor does the accusation stand up to any scrutiny. We have edited the title to prevent any further misunderstanding by our community or others and I hope that this action and my apology to Microsoft is sufficient to atone for my mistake.

Apology to sigma

The editor's role includes that of trying to look at each story from both sides to provide a balanced approach. We are not here to support one particular view in preference to another but to provide material that will inspire discussion between members of our community. I published the story that sigma submitted, but attempted to balance it with the alternative view that suggested it was not specifically a Microsoft trait to defend one's business and that it could be argued that they were also attempting to protect their British workforce. However, I did not make it clear where sigma's comments ended and where my editing began, although I did add an Editor's Comment explaining that the story had been edited and that not all comments were those of the submitter. sigma has, quite justifiably, objected to this action and I must, therefore, apologise to him personally. I do apologise to sigma, again publicly and unreservedly, for any changes that I made to the submission that he feels reflect badly upon him.

Our Role

This was most certainly not my best piece of work and, of course, I must also apologise to the community. The editors do, however, have to edit stories; members of the community should not expect their submissions to be a platform for their personal views. Some stories require more editing than others to be suitable for the front page. In this instance, I made a mistake. We will always try to find a balanced approach to any story that needs it, as described in the Editing Process.

As I have already said, I take full responsibility for the stories that I release, including the one arising from sigma's submission. We value each and every submission, even those that do not make it to publication however, we do ask that submitters do not suggest events or actions that are not backed up by the source material, or are not easily verifiable by other means.

janrinok
Editor

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday May 24 2015, @01:36AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday May 24 2015, @01:36AM (#187037) Journal
    It's not the same thing. Anything submitted is posted with a banner that starts 'Submitter writes...'. It's therefore assumed that anything that follows, unless it's an explicit quote, is from the submitter. It would be equally bad if the submitter then said 'Some article says...' followed by something not in the article (and I'd hope that the editors do check that the articles actually say what is claimed and that quotes come from the article). It's completely fine for a submitter to say 'Look, here is an article that says something stupid, let's mock it' because their name is attached to this and the article's authors have their names attached to their opinions and we can see which one really looks sensible after reading both.
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  • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Sunday May 24 2015, @03:40AM

    by vux984 (5045) on Sunday May 24 2015, @03:40AM (#187066)

    Anything submitted is posted with a banner that starts 'Submitter writes...'. It's therefore assumed that anything that follows, unless it's an explicit quote, is from the submitter.

    Yes, its the submitters -summary-. The presumption then is that it's an accurate summary of what the article authors said.

    It's completely fine for a submitter to say 'Look, here is an article that says something stupid, let's mock it' because their name is attached to this and the article's authors have their names attached to their opinions and we can see which one really looks sensible after reading both.

    Not if the commenters presume the summary is in fact a summary of the article and therefore don't read the article. (What? Not read the article? Sure nobody does that!)

    I hear what you are saying but we need a summary of the article BEFORE we start tearing it apart. Maybe submissions should be in two parts... a summary, and the submitters response.