Corrections Policy
Why corrections get their own policy here
Every publication makes errors. What distinguishes a serious one is what happens next. At MMJ GAZETTE the stakes of an error are unusually concrete: a wrong sentence about a study’s findings, a qualifying condition, or a jurisdiction’s rules can shape a decision a patient makes. So corrections here are not housekeeping; they are part of the editorial product, handled by rules written down in advance. Report an error to support@mmjgazette.com with “Correction” in the subject line and the article URL.
The severity ladder
Not all errors are equal, and pretending otherwise makes the important ones invisible. We work on three tiers.
Tier one: safety-relevant errors
Errors in medical or legal substance: a misstated study finding, an incorrect claim about what a program permits, a wrong figure in anything dose-related, an incorrect statement about a product recall, or a misattributed clinical claim. These are treated as urgent. On a verified report, the article is corrected as fast as review allows, ideally the same working day, and if the error cannot be immediately resolved, the disputed passage is flagged or removed while we check. The correction is labeled at the article, stating what was wrong and what is now stated instead.
Tier two: substantive errors
Errors of fact that misinform without direct safety impact: a wrong date, a misspelled name, a misstated title, a garbled statistic that does not change the story’s meaning. These are corrected promptly once verified, with a correction note appended when the error could have misled a reasonable reader.
Tier three: infelicities
Typos, broken links, formatting faults, and grammatical slips that could not mislead anyone. These are fixed silently. Silence here is not concealment; a note reading “corrected a comma” would bury the corrections that matter under ones that do not.
How a correction is displayed
Corrections at tiers one and two are visible at the article itself, with the date of the correction. We state what the article previously said and what it says now; a correction a reader cannot reconstruct is an apology, not a correction. Where an article’s central premise proves wrong, we do not quietly rewrite it. It is either corrected with a prominent note explaining the scale of the change, or retracted with the retraction note left in place of the text. Articles are not silently deleted.
Updates are not corrections
Medical cannabis is a moving field. A study is superseded; a legislature amends a program; an agency issues new rules. When the world changes after an accurate article was published, we may append an update note, and the two labels are never mixed: a correction means we were wrong; an update means the situation changed. Readers deserve to know which one they are looking at.
How to report an error
- Link the article and quote or describe the specific passage.
- Say what you believe is accurate, and point to a source if you have one: the study itself, the regulation, the program’s official page.
- Include a way to reach you if we need clarification. Anonymous reports are still investigated; they are simply harder to follow up.
Every report is checked against primary sources under our fact-checking policy before any change is made, which also protects the archive against confident but mistaken complaints. We aim to acknowledge correction reports within two working days, and safety-relevant reports faster.
Disagreement is not error
Some requests we decline: demands to change accurate reporting that a subject dislikes, requests to remove lawful coverage of public matters, or objections to an interpretation clearly presented as analysis. We correct facts. We do not negotiate them. Where a subject of coverage disputes our account, we will hear them out, re-check the record, and either correct or stand by the story, and we will tell them which and why.
Learning from the log
Corrections are reviewed internally for pattern: if the same class of error recurs, the fix belongs in our process, not just in the article. That review is how this policy and our editorial standards get amended over time.
