How do you apologise when you’ve made a serious mistake? I wrote about how brands can actually be more successful by admitting imperfections and mistakes last week – and tonight I happened to read a jaw-dropping example of a mistake by a newspaper (via Newspaper Death Watch).
The summary is the photo of an innocent 40-year-old man named Angel Ortiz was used in a front page story about a horrific crime comitted by a 20-year-old with the same, and apparently very common, Spanish name. As a result, the innocent party has lost work, been persecuted and is effectively reduced to hiding in his house in fear of what might happen in public.
I’m sure that noone involved in publishing the story ever intended this to happen, but when a lawyer for the innocent Ortiz wrote to the paper demanding a front page retraction, the newspaper responded by removing the image from its website, and the ‘retraction ran on the bottom of page 2, with no photo‘.
Why apologies are business-critical:
I understand that sometimes the ‘right’ thing to do can run into roadblocks when lawyers advise on the ‘correct legal’ thing to do. But certainly retractions need to be an equal size and prominence to the original content, and reach the same audience.
Secondly, there’s been no personal apology, or any help and assistance in correcting the situation, which would have gone some way to rectifying the situation. I’m trying to think of any legal reasons why the paper couldn’t have run something asking for help in finding work for an innocent man, for example, besides their own guilt?
But here’s the thing – I don’t know the newspaper or any of the parties involved, and I’m located halfway around the world, but I’ll now associated the MetroWest Daily with this debacle. I’ve now also written about it to you, and shared it via Twitter etc. Besides my personal feelings about whether I’ll ever read or do business with the company, some quick google searches for relevant terms shows a number of sites picking up on the screwup, and nothing on the newspaper website offering any explanation or apology to make me think any better of them.
What they should be doing:
Anyone using a search engine for related terms will see coverage of this horrendous mistake. What the paper should have done is looked at how this error happened (and how to prevent it in the future), and then published a full apology in print and online which explains how they’ll avoid making such a disaster in the future. A human response would at least appear online and in search to provide some mitigation.
They should then have followed that up with a decent effort to try to rectify things (along with a personal apology), perhaps by running follow-ups to help Ortiz find work – again, this would show that despite the mistake, there are decent human people working at the newspaper, as well as that evidence appearing in search and social networks.
It’s how you handle mistakes that matters:
Errors have always happened, even if they seem more and more likely due to widespread editorial cuts around the world. But whereas the outcry even 15 years ago would have been barely noticeable in another country, the internet means that everything is catalogued and saved for all eternity.
If you understand that any mistake is extremely likely to be publicly indexed, then you understand that the response is key. And that response is going to be seen around the world, for as long as we have an internet, so responding ethically is more important than any other consideration.
And if you’re publishing or re-publishing any image online, double-check and triple-check the source, the content and the licensing restrictions.
