The Mail on Sunday has published the first of its corrections columns in today's edition, after the move was announced on Wednesday by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre.

Explaining the new inclusion, the paper states:

"The Mail on Sunday strives for complete accuracy in every article, but it is inevitable when working against deadlines that mistakes are sometimes made and misunderstandings arise.

"We have always been ready to publish corrections, and from today we will ensure this happens quickly and prominently with the launch of this new column."



It is welcome to see that the paper has taken the earliest available opportunity to correct last week's article on Motability cars, which our factcheck showed to contain a number of significant inaccuracies. 

However the online version of last Sunday's article still appears to be available without any reference being made today's correction. We will be contacting the Mail on Sunday to request that this is resolved.

Full Fact understands that a number of complaints were made to the PCC over the article. Our experience of the PCC suggests that had the MoS not taken the initiative it is unlikely the correction would have been printed so promptly, due to the nature of the process and volume of complaints to the PCC. 

That said, when complaints have been handled via the PCC, corrective action has been taken for both print and online versions of an article.

Nevertheless this highlights why the first stage of effective self regulation of the press should be the newspapers themselves without getting the regulator involved.

As our Director, Will Moy, said to the Leveson Inquiry this week, we see potential for indirect regulation via readers’ editors. The regulator would provide quality control, gather data from them for intelligence-led investigations, and act as a second tier for complaints.

This might provide a fairly quick, cheap and informal first tier system, where newspapers bear more of the costs of their own complaints.

It is no panacea, but wrangling over the ideal system of press regulation will drag on through the months of Leveson hearings and beyond.  Such discussions will need to focus on whether more effective regulation would have stopped the errors being made in the first place.

In the meantime one uncontroversial and sensible step would be improving efforts to deal with corrections in house, through readers' editors and corrections columns.

The Mail on Sunday has at least shown today that this small step can deliver some worthwhile improvements.