ON COLUMNIST CORRECTIONS in the New York Times (further to my comments on journalistic corrections in my anniversary post): Daniel Okrent, the public editor of the Times has a column on the subject today (via InstaPundit). Excerpts:

For the news pages, the rule is succinct. "Because its voice is loud and far-reaching," the paper's stylebook says, "The Times recognizes an ethical responsibility to correct all its factual errors, large and small (even misspellings of names), promptly and in a prominent reserved space in the paper." But on the page where The Times's seven Op-Ed columnists roam, there has long been no rule at all, or at least not one clearly elucidated and publicly promulgated. When I began in this job last fall, I was told The Times considered the space granted Op-Ed columnists theirs to use as they wish, subject only to the limits of legality, decency and publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.'s patience. Columnists decided when to run corrections, and where in their columns to run them.

But several days ago, editorial page editor Gail Collins handed me a memo in response to my inquiries. (You can read it in its entirety at www.nytimes.com/danielokrent; look for posting No. 22.) Less a formal statute than an explanation and justification of practice, the document lays out the position of both Collins and her boss, Sulzberger, who bears ultimate responsibility for hiring and firing columnists. Collins explains why columnists must be allowed the freedom of their opinions, but insists that they "are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column." Corrections, under this new rule, are to be placed at the end of a subsequent column, "to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere," a reference to the wide syndication many of the columnists enjoy.

[...]

Anyone who calls the Internet's bustling trade in columnist-attack a cottage industry might more accurately liken it to the arms bazaar in Peshawar. Peace and calm were not enhanced a few weeks ago when Times lawyers took a legal sledgehammer to an imaginary Op-Ed corrections column published by Robert Cox of the Web site The National Debate - but peace and calm rarely accompany arguments about political opinion in a polarized age.

[...]

In the coming months I expect columnist corrections to become a little more frequent and a lot more forthright than they've been in the past. Yet the final measure of Collins's success, and of the individual columnists, will be not in the corrections but in the absence of the need for them. Wayne Wren of Houston, a self-described conservative and "avid reader" of National Review Online, expressed it with great equanimity in a recent e-mail message to my office: "If Mr. Krugman is making egregious errors in his Op-Ed column, they will catch up with him." Same goes for Brooks, Dowd, Friedman, Herbert, Kristof and Safire - and, most important, for The New York Times.

You can find the memo here. This sounds like an improvement, although I still think it would be a good idea to put the correction (or at least a link to it) at the bottom of the original column when it's online. As I said before, Okrent is doing a good job. More power to him.