I recently encountered a sticky conundrum as editor of a student-run digital news website at the University of Southern California.

A woman, the centerpiece of a story on the continued plight of the architecture industry in California three years after the recession, contacted one of my reporters in a panic. The source was a Canadian citizen, and it became too expensive a few years ago for her California employer to sponsor her work visa. She was laid off. She took the only job she could find in Vancouver—at a 40 percent salary cut.

Now, times are better. Our source wants to work stateside again in an architecture firm and is setting up interviews with potential employers. But there’s one big problem: when potential employers google her name to do a background check, they notice this old article, and her visa troubles wave a red flag. Would they have to sponsor her too, and at what cost? Her complaints in the story about having to take a job in Vancouver reek of sour grapes. She grouses about working for her old corporate company. And she admits to having accepted the steep pay cut in Canada, which could now hurt in salary negotiations.

This article, she said, might be keeping her from getting a job, and she wants it removed.

That was when I realized our newsroom has no policy on what the industry has termed “unpublishing”—the removal of online news articles. And I am not alone, says Kathy English, public policy editor at the Toronto Star.

“I think news organizations are moving toward figuring it all out,” English said. “Even just this week I had four requests (to unpublish).”

She wrote a report [pdf] on the issue in 2009, which found that about half of newsrooms polled lacked an unpublishing policy.

“Public requests to unpublish are becoming increasingly frequent and are expected to increase,” English wrote in her report, after polling more than 100 editors across North America.

Three years later, the news industry is still catching up as unpublishing requests escalate, said English, and journalistic coverage, often called the “first draft of history,” migrates from paper to screen.

“There is something different about online content, because it lasts forever and is easily accessible,” English said. “It’s not the same as newspapers in trash bins.”

Though most editors agreed, according to English’s report, that there are some cases that justify deleting information—like inaccuracies or legal concerns—few editors in America would remove our architecture story. Across the board, editors refuse to redact a story because a source regrets something he or she said.

But is that fair to sources? Today, a print past isn’t hidden in newspaper archives or on microfilm. Even old content is just a click away. Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and stores it as a cache. Pages that were removed can still come up in searches. Beyond Google, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has archived more than 150 billion web pages from 1996 to now.

As editors hold firm, the web creates more and more of these “digital tattoos” that can never go away and are much more visible than in previous journalistic eras. Even if a news organization does decide to remove or alter an article, it’s no guarantee the original content doesn’t still live somewhere on the Internet.

Recently, English said, the Toronto Star staff decided it needed to take a name out of a piece for legal reasons.

“Working with our webmasters, it took about three days to figure out how to do that with Google, because it was in the abstract,” English said. “It was a really hard thing to do. And that made me also realize we can’t say yes to all these things because we don’t have the manpower.”

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Dan Watson is the editor in chief of Neon Tommy.