[WikiEN-l] NY Times considers BLP issues

[William Pietri]

charles.r.matthews at 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 at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri