“That’s finishing in a beauty contest behind a burro,” he wrote.

According to the award founders, newspapers need to take steps to appear more reliable and better clarify and correct published mistakes.

“A free press must also be a responsible press, and that means a press that is fair to both individuals and institutions in the news,” Globe Chair Emeritus William O. Taylor said in a press release. The Taylor family sold the Globe to the New York Times Company in 1993.

According to Bob Haiman, a former executive editor at the St. Petersburg Times, several recent improvements at national newspapers serve as proof that newspapers can improve, including a pilot program at the Chicago Tribune that tracked every error in the newspaper and the reason that they occurred. In five years, the paper was able to reduce mistakes by 50 percent.

He also suggested that other newspapers adopt the policy of the San Jose Mercury News, which allows subjects of stories to withdraw or revise a quote in certain circumstances. The rule does not apply to public figures, but to “naive, ordinary citizens who didn’t realize that what they said might get them fired, sued, divorced, etc.

“If journalists would only listen...to readers talk about the changes that would make them think the press is trying to be fair, much progress could be made,” Haiman wrote.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.