Last week Arthur Brisbane, the new public editor of the New York Times, posted an illuminating exchange between a reader of the paper and one of its top editors.
The reader asked: What’s with the way stories change all the time on the website? “How does the newspaper of record handle this? I read something, and now poof, it’s gone without a trace.”
Jim Roberts, the paper’s associate managing editor, responded: “We are constantly refining what we publish online.” He added that the paper often”uses the final printed version as the final archived version that stays on the Web.” But not always! There are “many exceptions.”
The headline over the column reads “Revising the Newspaper of Record.” But what the exchange reveals is that, right now, there is no record of the newspaper of record. The Times is revising its copy online all the time. No doubt the vast majority of these “refinements” are trivial or uncontroversial. But some of them are likely substantial. If I understand Times policy correctly, when a change fixes an outright error, it is supposed to be marked with a correction notice. But there’s no record of these changes, so the Times could be cutting corners here and we’d never know.
When I raise this issue I sometimes hear back some variation on “What’s the big deal? Wire services change their copy all the time. Newspapers have always revised stories from edition to edition. How’s the Web different?"
I’ll tell you how: When newspapers change a story from the early to the late edition, the early edition is still out there for people to read and compare. When you change a Web page, the older version disappears, unless you take active steps to save it.
Read more here.
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