Since 2004, Montreal-based journalist Craig Silverman has collected and posted the most egregious media corrections on his website RegretTheError.com. In Regret the Error the book, Silverman not only assembles the highlights of this collection, but also offers a treatise on the need for renewed vigilance against mistakes in journalism, particularly with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and the blogosphere.

Beginning with his history of the early 19th-century penny papers, Silverman reveals a gift for excavating long-lost press mistakes, as well as a true delight in the revealing details that expose journalism’s frequent hypocrisies and failures. He unearths an array of premature obituaries, plagiarism, hoaxes, typos, and numerical glitches while exploring the nature of error itself: the slips that are accidental fudges in meaning, and those caused by ill-formed conclusions or bad judgment calls.

Silverman convincingly argues that thorough, timely, public, and searchable corrections should be the pride of any media organization – especially in the absence of a fact-checker to catch these errors (and the chapter on fact-checkers is not to be missed). He believes that such corrections are one of the most important tools for maintaining journalistic standards.

Unfortunately, according to Silverman, mainstream media’s struggle with error is amplified in the age of the Internet. In what he calls the Twenty Four Hour Broken-Telephone, mistakes are replicated as stories speed through competing news networks and wire services. Compounding this trend, the Internet has become a battleground between partisan bloggers and watchdogs, each attempting to push their own agenda.

Silverman’s analysis tends to view this free-for-all as ultimately a very good thing – a “truth will out” process that should, ideally, lead to more rigorous reporting. Too bad he doesn’t try to measure the impact all this muddying of the water has on a spin-doctored public trying to hang on to the vestiges of democracy. It’s a tall order, trusting that the Internet will make us more actively engaged citizens as we tussle with the media over facts and truth. Even the most important stories can be lost as the signal becomes noise.