Regret the Error, now housed at Poynter, has published the best media errors and corrections, and there are plenty of good ones listed. The Typo of The Year is “Obama/Osama,” because when Osama bin Laden was killed, Obama bin Laden was too. Sadly, we hear Michelle Osama remains at large.

The Error of The Year was the incorrect report that Gabrielle Giffords had been killed when she was shot. For a detailed breakdown of how that spread like wildfire, check here.

Perhaps the best (worst?) mistake came from The Charlotte Observer. It had the honor of having to issue this correction:

A front-page story in some editions Monday incorrectly referred to Osama bin Laden as Obama. In the same story, a photograph cutline wrongly said two aircraft hit the same tower of the World Trade Center. The planes hit different towers.

That’s one hell of a mistake.

According to a PRWeek poll, the value placed on an exclusive is fading away fast. Of the 855 surveyed, the journalists working in online media placed very little value on getting the story first, while those working in traditional media found it to still be important. Poynter has the breakdown:

42% of traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV, wires, magazines) find it “extremely important” to be the first to report on a topic via an exclusive or a scoop vs. 25% of online media (bloggers, online news sites)

There were other findings from the survey as well — a majority of media reported that social media has increased their audience and while 58 percent of traditional journalists digest their media online, their online counterparts digest 95 percent of it via the Internet — but let’s stick to the death of the exclusive.

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Today in offputting, we hear from Poynter that Houston Press, a Village Voice affiliate, wrote a post called “10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List.”

Funny stuff. Note that women on the list have assaulted boys and girls ranging from two to 16 years old.

The writer of the piece, editor Richard Connelly, was, obviously, taken to task in the comments under the post, such as this one: “There is nothing about child molestation that should be glorified. I cannot believe this got published and everyone involved should be fired.”

Now he has issued an apology, and explained the genesis of this post:

Last week I spoke to two veteran child-porn prosecutors… It triggered an idea about how people have a pre-conceived notion of what dangerous predators “always” look like — slovenly fat guys in t-shirts asking kids if they wanted a ride — and how best to shake that notion up.

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The Daily is supposed to launch next Wednesday, but if you can’t wait that long for it, Damon Kiesow at Poytner hacked into the iPad newspaper’s website and found the picture on the right. It appears to be an in-house ad featuring two mock covers, and surprise! It’s two people who don’t get nearly enough attention already: Oprah and Brett Favre.

Kiesow was also able to uncover some other bits of information. He says that he found icons for Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and YouTube, as well coding that indicates there will be an embedded video player on The Daily.

So basically he found out things that pretty much everyone figured would be included. But he did get us a glimpse of two covers, so that’s something.

After Roger Ebert recent profile in Esquire magazine, which detailed his many surgeries to fight cancer and has left him unable to eat, drink, or speak, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist and perhaps one of the two most iconic movie critics in the world (the other being his late partner, Gene Siskel) the narrative on the street seemed to be “This is Ebert’s last interview.” Instead, the outspoken writer took to his column today to say that even though several blogs and other outlets have picked up on the “final words” narrative (so to speak), that we’re “all dying in increments” (as Poynter likened its column). Even though he was shocked by the picture of himself used in the Esquire column, with part of his lower jaw missing as he stares mischievously into the camera, he says, “If we think we have physical imperfections, obsessing about them is only destructive.”

Read More: Roger Ebert’s Last Words, con’t. — Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert: The Essential Man — Esquire

Is this the turning of the content tide? For months now we’ve been looking forward to seeing Steve Brill‘s model for regulating content with his new company JournalismOnline, which will be using a platform called Press+ to standardize pay walls for websites. We have yet to see JO work in practice, but other media companies are already jumping on the Press+ bandwagon, most recently the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and the Enterprise-Record in California, which should be ready for the content provider come April or May, and be the first sites to test the new system. Both papers are owned by MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper holders in the country.

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With Newsweek NewsDay about to begin charging access to their online articles via a pay wall, we’re beginning to wonder if there is any other alternative for print publications to make money off the web. Obviously, ads aren’t cutting it, and if you aren’t charging readers access, then you’re giving your content away.

Journalism Online – a new media consulting agency formed by media gurus Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, Jr – is offering what might be the best solution yet to this problem: In the next month or so, 10-15 publishers will roll out the media consulting site’s pay model, which involves a gradual, not abrupt, dip into the charging-for-content sector.

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