On 8/26/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Yes, very interesting. Journalists are so charming. "We can't change the article because it is part of the historical record." Such confusion. Journalism is only ever 'the first draft of history'.
I disagree with you here. Already published articles are part of the historical record - they represent what was thought at the time that they were written.
Of course, it should be much much easier than it is to find corrections (they should probably just be attached to the original articles) but originals should not be altered. Keep in mind that we do the same thing by publishing the current version but retaining all prior versions of a page. We do better than many newspaper archives by making the "corrected" version the default display, but we still leave the originals intact.