Corrections Policy

A correction is warranted when a story contains a factual error that could mislead readers about what happened, who was involved, where it occurred, when it occurred, or how a public claim should be understood.

Examples include misidentifying a person or institution, misstating a timeline, misstating the outcome of an official action, or collapsing a disputed claim into a verified fact.

Some problems are not fully wrong, but they still leave readers with the wrong impression. In those cases, Zwely News uses a clarification. That can apply when a sentence compresses too much nuance, blurs the difference between allegation and evidence, or leaves out important context that changes the meaning.

Clarifications should make the story easier to understand, not merely more defensible.

If a developing story changes in a meaningful way, the update note should state what changed in plain English. A reader should not need to compare archived versions line by line just to understand whether the headline, core fact pattern, or official status of the story has moved.

That is especially important for legal stories, election coverage, markets, disasters, and ongoing conflicts, where old information can become stale quickly.

The point of a correction is not to minimize embarrassment. It is to make the record more accurate for the next reader and the next one after that. A newsroom that is too precious to correct itself eventually trains readers not to trust anything else it says.