charles.r.matthews(a)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'.
Although I don't think they should stop there, I think there's something
to what they say. Long ago I worked in a library, and archived artifacts
are sacred in that context. That a newspaper gets something wrong can
have impacts, and their original articles should be part of the
permanent record. If people edited the "Dewey Beats Truman" stories out
of the record merely because they were wrong, it would be a terrible thing.
Newpapers are notoriously bad at publishing adequate
apologies and corrections: no real prominence given. And now it turns out that not only
are they not interested in doing a second draft, they regard the first draft as part of
the 'historical record', not to be tampered with.
I think this is mainly a historical artifact. It's only very recently
that articles were even conceivably changeable, and newspapers see
themselves as mainly about the new. What has changed here is that access
to archives is now orders of magnitude easier. What took hours or days
before now takes seconds.
It seems to me that places like Salon, digital from the beginning, have
a different attitude to corrections. And even they are built out of
people with print experience and print-focused training, so I think it
will take a couple of decades before the industry catches up with your view.
But even then, there will be limits. A minor correction or a footnote
isn't a big problem for them, and they'll get a lot better at that.
Instead, I think there are two issues that will keep them from ever
making people very happy.
The first is that at some point they have to stop writing drafts of
history. A footnote is no problem, but at some point dealing with a
correction request is equivalent to re-reporting the article. The
constraints of their profession compel them pretty quickly accept an
article as finished work that can be followed up with another article --
if the public is still interested enough in the topic.
When you accept that, the natural thought is that maybe they should
write better first drafts. That sounds good, but I think writing a
single article to a much higher level means doubling or more the
resources for a single article. Economically that's infeasible with
their current model unless they find some way, as bloggers have, of
shifting most of the cost burden to readers and other writers.
I'm rather cheered about WP's model. I was
asked last night whether WP posts apologies. No, we don't, but rather than a formulaic
expression of regret, we can move fast to fix things up and have fewer pretensions about
always being right.
Excellent point. And to be fair, a lot of us personally apologize.
William
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri