So the thing about writ­ing books and not blog posts is that they go to print­ers. Then people point out that you might not have got some­thing right. And there is no com­ments sec­tion and no oppor­tun­ity to update what you have writ­ten (bar­ring the mir­acle of other editions).

So what to do about it? Well, I figured I’d post amend­ments here, tagged Can You Trust The Media? and cor­rec­tions. See how disin­genu­ous that is? I should just tag them mis­takes. So I’ll add that tag too.

It made me pon­der, now that the pro­cess of writ­ing is com­plete, the dumb gap between my own argu­ments for greater trans­par­ency and bet­ter inform­a­tion, and a book which comes without notes.

On the trans­par­ency front, I do at least offer dir­ect com­mu­nic­a­tion with the author. I can tell you dir­ectly where inform­a­tion comes from. But whilst that approach works on the micro-level, it hardly scales.

On the mis­in­form­a­tion front, it’s sadly just my fault. (When I ran a news­room it was easier to find someone to blame.)

That’s where you come in. Let me know about fac­tual errors or even a mis­take of inter­pret­a­tion and I’ll post it here. And there are prob­ably typos still lurk­ing in the copy.

So before any­one gets in the crack about not being able to trust someone writ­ing about trust in the media, I just made it (and the book takes a dif­fer­ent kind of line).

Mean­while, a big thank you to every­one who came along to Mag­dalene to hear me chew the fat with the very kind Allison Pear­son.

Now I just hope I don’t keep Craig Sil­ver­man in business.

Update: And, I should have known it, Jack Shafer has kindly poin­ted out that Craig’s own cor­rec­tions for his book (a copy of which just landed on my desk) are a model illustration.