Of all the requests she’s received to erase information contained in online articles, Kathy English, the public editor of the Toronto Star, says one in particular stands out.
The reason? It came from a fellow journalist, on behalf of a friend who wanted some embarrassing and outdated information scrubbed from the Star’s Web site. English couldn’t believe a journalist would endorse that kind of request.
“That’s when I knew that I was on top of something in terms of the industry not having consistency [when it comes to this issue],” English says.
As public editor, English deals with a flood of requests from people who want the paper to update or eliminate older articles from its Web site. The Star is far from alone in this regard. Earlier this year, I detailed the process used by The New York Times to handle these similar requests. (In short, the paper will sometimes append corrections to older articles, especially when a person was charged with a felony and the paper failed to report their acquittal or the charges being dropped.)
Over the past year, the “unpublishing” issue became a challenge for news organizations of all sizes. Now, thanks to research by English that was funded by the Associated Press Managing Editors, we have a sense of how newspapers all over the United States are dealing with this issue.
English produced a detailed report, “The Long Tail of News: To Unpublish or not to Unpublish,” that includes results from a survey completed by over 100 newspaper editors. Her report also suggests appropriate policies and procedures—an important step, given that the survey makes it clear there’s no defined standard or policy among journalists.
“We’re not there,” English says. “I presented my findings to the APME at a conference in St. Louis and it was clear from the discussion that we’re are all over the map.”
As news organizations build large online archives, and as these archives appear in search engine results, the issue of correcting and updating older articles is only going to become more important, not to mention time consuming. You used to be able to publish a story and move on, rarely thinking of it again. Not anymore. News organizations are responsible for maintaining and updating everything on our Web sites. A story doesn’t end or resolve when it’s published online. It begins, and we’re responsible for it.
This is a huge challenge, especially for resource-strapped newsrooms. The vast majority of news organizations are not equipped to maintain their online archives. This makes the onslaught of reader requests for archival changes all the more difficult to handle.
One organization, GateHouse Media, is attempting to handle this problem by introducing “sunset clauses” for some of its reporting. English’s report notes that this means “police blotter reports are programmed when published to ‘fall off’ the news organizations’ Websites six months after initial publication.”
If this experiment works for GateHouse, we could end up seeing other organizations adopt a form of planned obsolescence for some of their content. Of course, when English presented this approach to other editors, one person from the Chicago Sun-Times objected to the idea, saying that “this is part of somebody’s history and we should know these things about people.” So, the debate continues.
One practice that simply isn’t an option for responsible journalists is scrubbing—removing incorrect or outdated information from an online article without adding a correction, editor’s note, or some similar disclosure for readers. English says her survey found that most editors realize that scrubbing is unethical.
“I think we’ve come a long way in the last couple of years in recognizing that scrubbing is wrong, but it still happens,” she says. “What I still see falling through the cracks is when a reporter goes to an online editor saying, ‘Can you change this?’”
As someone who likes to comment on the New York Times blogs, I have noted that they are scrubbed constantly without any note whatsoever. For example, I commented on an error in a food stamp article. Instead of displaying my comment pointing out the error, a short while later the blog entry was scrubbed and changed. My comment never appeared.
While it is commendable that reporters quickly respond to errors, not appending a note of a correction is improper. And disconcerting.
#1 Posted by S, CJR on Sun 6 Dec 2009 at 09:53 AM
Actually, I'm all in favor of quick, low-fuss scrubbing of stories that mangle a fact or two. It's a simple way to improve the accuracy of Web archives. On routine stories, media organizations aren't really much different from contractors putting in tile floors . . . or teachers grading exams . . . or check-out clerks ringing up the price of groceries.
We're talking about high-volume, low-glory work that usually is done to pretty solid standards, but where minor mistakes are a way of life, too.
Fix the mistakes. Fix them quickly with a minimum of fuss. Treat the customer, reader or student with respect -- and don't act as if the future of the First Amendment is at stake. It isn't.
What is at stake is readers' belief that a media organization either can tidy up minor errors with the speed and grace of the tile guy, teacher, etc. -- or for reasons of institutional arrogance, just plain can't. There's nothing like a three-week set of hassles, talking to a half-dozen different people who all have to get "involved" before a minor error can be tidied up, to make readers get really tired of dealing with "the media."
The overly fussy approach of Public Editors is designed to provide job security for Public Editors -- and annoyance for everyone else.
#2 Posted by Disappearing Reader, CJR on Sun 6 Dec 2009 at 06:56 PM
Before launching The Ann Arbor Chronicle in September 2008, we spent considerable time talking about how to handle corrections. Accountability and transparency are important, but we didn't see any real models among online news publications for handling this. Ultimately, we decided to make corrections in a very visible way. To correct an error in an article, we strike through the incorrect word or phrase or (gulp) sentence and put that section in red. If we need to add information, the addition is made in blue text. We also have a "Missed Ticks" section on our front page (alluding to a general clock motif on our site), which notes each error and links back to the original articles.
Not sure if this falls into the "overly fussy" category or not. I hope that it instills a greater level of trust with our readers, and highlights the fact that we take the notion of "public record" very seriously.
#3 Posted by Mary Morgan, CJR on Fri 11 Dec 2009 at 11:56 AM