How good a job are newspapers doing with online corrections? Occasional and highly informal surfing among the usual suspects of newspapers suggests newspapers are doing a better job of at least providing access to corrections of mistakes, errors, misstatements, etc.

That lengthy wording of corrections is necessary; several months to a year ago, looking for “corrections” online would often lead one NOT to acknowledgement of mistakes, but rather to stories about prisons and state correction agencies.

In the past day or, so however, a check of 10 newspapers found that five actually had a category of “corrections” listed in an index or elsewhere on their home pages – and those corrections dealt with mistakes, not with people in stir. The five are the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Seattle Times, and Chicago Tribune.

Four newspapers defied you find any errors they had corrected and instead directed you to stories about prisons or advertisements for a career as a correctional officer: The Des Moines Register, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Miami Herald, and the Dallas Morning News. (The Des Moines Register, by the way, used to run corrections on its home page — not merely provide a link to them — but it now treats a search for “corrections” as an inquiry about state prisons.)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hit the middle of the road. While corrections is not a category on the home page, the search box on the home page allows you to reach corrections in news stories.

Broadcast operations appear to be a lost cause on corrections. CBSnews.com, for example, had no mea culpas of its own, but a search would lead you to a 2004 CBS story about corrections — “that humble corner where (print) journalists go to write their wrongs.”

One other question still to be pursued is whether the corrections listed on line are reflected in the stories archived on line. But at least we appear to be making some progress in being correction-friendly online. Check out your newspaper and, if you’re having problems finding corrections, let them know.