Daily Mail to launch page two correction column

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre today announced that his paper will, from next week, include a corrections column.

Speaking at the Leveson inquiry this morning, Mr Dacre said in future that errors would be rectified in a dedicated section printed on page two of the paper. The column will also be introduced for the Mail on Sunday and Metro newspapers.

After Full Fact disputed his claim earlier this year that the notion that papers "bury" corrections was "one of the great myths of our time," Mr Dacre acknowledged to the Inquiry that the prominence of corrections was something that needed to be improved.

Furthermore, after Full Fact Director Will Moy questioned Mr Dacre on the move, the Mail editor committed to establishing a corrections@dailymail.co.uk email address through which the public can request corrections more swiftly and easily than they can at present.

This is a welcome step in the right direction from the paper.

For months now we have been going through negotiations via the PCC over two significant errors that were printed on the front page of the Mail.

The correction process has since slowed to a halt over our insistence that a front page error requires a front page correction in order for "due prominence" to be achieved.

The PCC now needs to consider how the announcement addresses this issue of due prominence on corrections. After all, an error on any page save the front will now be corrected as far if not further forward in the paper.

However as Full Fact has commented in the past, there is more to correction prominence than the page on which it is printed. Other issues such as the size of the correction column itself and the way in which corrections are phrased can be of equal or greater importance.

There is no doubt that the move is an improvement on the current state of affairs. If complainants no longer need to go through several rounds of wrangling via the PCC over the placing of corrections, then we can hope that complaints might be resolved more quickly.

We will of course continue to monitor corrections in the Mail to ensure that Mr Dacre's words translate into action. We also hope that other papers will now follow the Mail's example and wear their commitment to correcting mistakes as a badge of pride.