A matter of pubic record
When newspapers made mistakes in the past, in one sense that was it: the papers were already in the shops and on the bottom of the budgie cage, the damage was done, and that was basically it.
If you were a weekly, you might make an effort to retrieve copies still on the shelves - which happens sometimes with magazines too - but there was no sense of a story lingering in the media's stratosphere for days or weeks to come.
And a photographic reproduction of exactly what appeared in the paper on any give day would also be preserved for the historical record on microfilm.
But things change dramatically if you're a newspaper with an online version - and that Web version has an archive. Do you still leave a story up, even though you could be in contempt of court, or defaming somebody, or plain inaccurate?
Yes, how do news organisations' online arms handle the big fuck-ups?
In the case of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent, you can look up PDF versions of their front pages of back editions (as long as you know the particular day). But if there's a major fuck-up with the story, the Indo crowd simply blank it out in the PDF. Not quite as flawless as airbrushing Stalin's ex-mates out of a photograph, it comes across as abrupt and clumsy.
Here's one such example - the doctored version of the notorious Liam Lawlor story from just over a week ago.
Other newspapers retain all their online stories exactly as they appeared in the final print edition of that day's newspaper, errors and all, and append any corrections in a separate box. It preserves the "official record" in an amended form rather than - in the Independent's case - wiping out history completely.
Or they might keep a libellous story online, with a very conspicuous correction attached. Some Amercian lawyers argue that instead of asserting it as fact any more, you're trying to show that it's incorrect, so it doesn't constitute a republication of the libel.
Others might go for a safer approach and replace a flawed article with an abstract of the story and an explanation of why it was removed.
There's another problem: even if you remove the offending page from your website, it could still be cached by the likes of Google. An example is the Observer's Lawlor story.
Once you cross the line and adopt a policy of fixing "minor" errors, where do you draw the line any more?
For example, suppose you spelt "pubic sector" instead of "public sector"? It's a typical error that can linger on - even in a paper of, er, "pubic" record such as the Irish Times.
Some might say that the online version should never be touched. On the other hand, newspapers aren't like that. There are continual revisions as a given edition of a newspaper is produced - even "just" its print version. If you were to catch an error on the first press run, you'd be on the blower to the printers and be correcting it.
Meanwhile there's a website dedicated to newspapers' clangers, corrections and clarifications, and it's called regrettheerror.com
Posted by mick cunningham at October 31, 2005 02:01 PM | Email a friend this entry
