The Web and the Future of Writing
AS NEWSPAPERS SURGE ONTO the Internet (more than 3,600 by late 1999), print
journalists have also learned to make use of tools long familiar to their
broadcast counterparts: tape recorders, video cameras, editing equipment for
sound and video, and mastered the knowledge of how to transmit such material
over the Internet.
The need to know about some of these
tools will obviously be greater if you work for an online news organization.
But it’s also important for every journalist entering the 21st century to have
some understanding of these tools. These are exciting times for reporters in
every area of the media. It’s a new world out there and it’s changing every
day. The journalists who will survive and succeed are those who are flexible
and open to such change.
Storytelling and News in the
Electronic Age
Leading journalism educators and
futurists forecast a time when techno-savvy reporters will use “mobile
journalist terminals” and omnidirectional cameras to regularly conduct
electronic interviews. Reporters, they say, will become multimedia presentation
teams. Someday. Perhaps.
But journalists need to bring a
little skepticism to new media, as they would to any issue. There’s no doubt
that newsroom technology has changed dramatically, but at what cost? Sure, it
sounds great that a reporter can interview sources by video conferencing
without leaving the newsroom. But too many stories today are written by the
telephone and, as a result, they lack the texture, completeness, and accuracy
that only person-to-person reporting can bring. Young reporters often find
face-to-face contacts awkward and uncomfortable, but they are the lifeblood of
good journalism. While new technologies bring important advances, I’d be
concerned if reporters used them as excuses to avoid the messy and sometimes
difficult aspects of real life.
Technology’s impact on storytelling
has always been profound since the days when reporters kept their stories short
to save on telegraph charges. In much the same way, today’s electronic
technology — live, satellite transmitted television — is changing the way that
reporters at America’s newspapers tell stories. Electronic texts have already
supplanted printed ones in our daily life, and will continue to do so,
presenting writers and their audiences with new ways to write and read. This
new kind of text has special relevance to journalists who continue to struggle
to create forms that demand to be read. We are living in the “late age of
print,” as new media scholar Jay David Bolter describes it, a time when words
printed on paper are being replaced by words flashed on computer screens. In
this early stage of new media, we are still in the process of discovering the
shape journalism will take in a new age.
In this new world, the inverted
pyramid is here to stay. The inverted pyramid is the story form of choice for
most of the news on the Internet, which is a breaking news medium. In that way
it follows the form of the first telegraph news transmissions — bulletins
followed by constantly updated dispatches. The inverted pyramid can help the
beginner — no matter the platform choice — to figure out the importance of
facts available. Then, the writer chooses the other form they might use.
“On the web, the inverted pyramid
becomes even more important since we know from several studies that users don’t
scroll, so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an
article,” argues Jakob Nielsen, a Sun Microsystems engineer who specializes in
Internet desktop design.
“Very interested readers will
scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid
and get the full story in all its gory detail,” he says. “Web writers split
their writing into smaller, coherent pieces to avoid long scrolling pages. Each
page would be structured as an inverted pyramid, but the entire work would seem
more like a set of pyramids floating in cyberspace than as a traditional
‘article.’ ”
Imagine that. Pyramids floating in
cyberspace.
Hypertext and the Future of Writing
The biggest change in writing
certainly for print journalists, will be adjusting to a new approach to the
concept of text.
The electronic age we live in has
redefined the very concept of what makes a story. Text used to mean one thing:
words on a page. More specifically, text meant “the main body of matter in a
manuscript, book, newspaper,” or “black on white.” With computers, that has
changed to “green on black” (the colors of the early monochrome monitors).
There’s another term that has
changed: document. When reporters and editors see the word, they may think of
court papers and other public records that support elements of their stories.
They need to consider documents in a different way.
“A document can be any body of
information. A newspaper article is a document, but the broadest definition also
includes a television show, a song, or an interactive video game. Because all
information can be stored in digital form, documents will be easy to find,
store, and send on the highway…Future digitally stored documents will include
pictures, audio, programming instructions for interactivity, and animation, or
a combination of these and other elements,” wrote Microsoft founder Bill Gates
in his book, The Road Ahead.
HTML, the abbreviation for
“HyperText Markup Language,” is the code that creates the text and graphic
layouts known as web pages. HTML was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in the early
1990s.
Its contemporary roots go back to
right after World War II. In a landmark article in Atlantic Monthly
titled “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush, who was one of President Roosevelt’s
top science advisers, proposed a system to deal with the deluge of information
available (they were drowning in data even then!).
Twenty years later, in 1965, a
visionary named Ted Nelson gave the name hypertext to Bush’s concept (“hyper”
is a Greek word meaning “beyond”). Hypertext is the feature that made the World
Wide Web possible by allowing users to move from place to place to place,
whether it’s inside the text itself or to another site on the Internet.
Hypertext is the heart of online
news.
But don’t be misled or dazzled by
the technology. Knowing HTML may get you a job coding pages for an online news
site, but it won’t make you a reporter. The people who run online sites are
clear about this: They want journalists, not just coders.
Writing for the Web: Style Issues
“Writing on the web has to be even
shorter, snappier, and more conversational,” says a former writer for washingtonpost.com
who covers technology for Cox Newspapers. “People aren’t looking for a block of
text; they want to know what’s going on. And they want to know it quickly. A
news story might have to be condensed into three sentences…and people are on
the lookout for the link, which is usually tied to the noun of the sentence.”
Web publishing will compel newspaper
reporters to adopt a broadcast style. In broadcast, you write to video and
still images, and to sound. You accompany, enhance, and amplify what the viewer
sees and hears from the screen. Words in broadcast complete the puzzle in the
reader’s mind. The writer for print, by contrast, must use language to create
in the reader’s mind what the television screen provides.
The broadcast writer writes for the
screen; the print writer tries to create a screen in the reader’s mind that the
memory and imagination can fill. Like the broadcast writer, the writer for the
web has additional electronic texts to work with (“e-texts” include video and
still images, animation, sound, as well as words). But just like the print
writer, the web writer must use language that is specific, vivid, and accurate.
The challenge for the web writer is
to use words to provide multiple perspectives—not to repeat information, but to
add new layers that deepen the understanding and impact of the story. But
technology also poses one of the great dangers of reporting/writing for the new
media, online news pioneer Bill Mitchell believes.
“Because of the additional tools at
the reporter’s disposal, there are at least a couple of dangers: (1) failure to
focus hard enough at the reporting stage to get the details that might — or
might not — be conveyed by the streaming video or audio accompanying the story;
and (2) an imprecision and incompleteness in the writing, based on the
assumption that these other tools will deliver those parts of the story left
out of the narrative.
“It’s a two-fold problem: at its
simplest level, it’s hard to do more than one thing at once and do them well,”
he adds. “But there’s also the subconscious feeling that those other tools will
convey those parts of the story. In both cases, the story suffers as a result.
This will be a challenge for the journalist of the future, who will be expected
to work simultaneously in several media. Not impossible and not necessarily
detrimental to the story, but clearly an undertaking that will require
extraordinary focus as well as skill.”
Old forms will continue to influence
the new ones. Landscape monitors are favored over portrait displays, according
to Kent State University’s Information Design Laboratory. People prefer by a
wide margin to read something that looks more horizontal than vertical.
The front pages of The Wall
Street Journal are used as a model in the online world. Online
practitioners design storyboards for their pages, just like film, television,
and advertising writers. In the online world, storyboards sketch content,
graphics, and hyperlinks, combining content with navigation. The first page may
be an anecdote, something to hook the reader. The next page provides context.
Subsequent pages link to content or segments that support or challenge the
story’s thesis.
My Poynter Institute colleague Mario
Garcia, who has redesigned hundreds of newspapers and has now begun redesigning
their websites, believes the new medium will enable the reader to choose among
the “quick read, the substantial read, and the encyclopedic read,” something
that print media have found difficult to accomplish.
While writers worry whether there will
be a place for them in the new media, I am heartened by the support that
writers get from Garcia, a visual artist, and other observers. “It is in
writing that I see the greatest possibilities for creativity, for pioneers to
leave the legacy that historians will talk about,” Garcia writes in Redesigning
Print for the Web.
Most importantly, the web writer
must inspire the user to scroll for further text, or to click for additional
information, just like writers in newspapers and magazines constantly try to
make sure readers go beyond a jump to an inside page. The challenge, to hold on
to readers, is identical, even if the medium is different.
Jakob Nielsen's
Alertbox for October 1, 1997
How Users Read on the Web
They don't.
People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page,
picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read
websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new
page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer
study found that users
read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.) As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
Users detested "marketese"; the promotional writing style with boastful subjective claims ("hottest ever") that currently is prevalent on the Web. Web users are busy: they want to get the straight facts. Also, credibility suffers when users clearly see that the site exaggerates.
Measuring the Effect of Improved Web Writing
To measure the effect of some of the content guidelines we
had identified, we developed five different versions of the same website (same
basic information; different wording; same site navigation). We then had users
perform the same tasks with the different sites. As shown in the table, measured usability
was dramatically higher for the concise version (58% better) and for the
scannable version (47% better). And when we combined three ideas for improved
writing style into a single site, the result was truly stellar: 124% better usability.
Site Version
|
Sample Paragraph
|
Usability
Improvement
(relative to control condition) |
Promotional writing
(control condition)
using the "marketese" found on many commercial websites |
Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized
attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In
1996, some of the most popular places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000
visitors), Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State
Historical Park & Museum (100,000), Carhenge
(86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill
Ranch State Historical Park (28,446).
|
0%
(by definition) |
Concise text
with about half the word count as the control condition |
In 1996, six of the best-attended attractions in Nebraska
were Fort Robinson State Park, Scotts Bluff National Monument, Arbor Lodge
State Historical Park & Museum, Carhenge,
Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer, and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical
Park.
|
58%
|
Scannable layout
using the same text as the control condition in a layout that facilitated scanning |
Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized
attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In
1996, some of the most popular places were:
|
47%
|
Objective language
using neutral rather than subjective, boastful, or exaggerated language (otherwise the same as the control condition) |
Nebraska has several attractions. In 1996, some of the
most-visited places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors), Scotts
Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State Historical Park &
Museum (100,000), Carhenge
(86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill
Ranch State Historical Park (28,446).
|
27%
|
Combined version
using all three improvements in writing style together: concise, scannable, and objective |
In 1996, six of the most-visited places in Nebraska were:
|
124%
|
Online News Stories that Change Behind Your Back
Posted by Roblimo on
Thursday May 09 2002, @09:10AM
from the who-controls-the-present-controls-the-past dept.
from the who-controls-the-present-controls-the-past dept.
Major news Web sites routinely rewrite stories after they
are published, sometimes so heavily that they only bear a glancing resemblance
to what was posted earlier. This
CNN/Money article about the penalty phase of the Microsoft trial is a prime
example. What you see at the other end of the link is quite different from the
story that first appeared at that URL. Even the headline and byline have
changed. But CNN/Money managing editor Allen Wastler says there is nothing
wrong with this practice, even though there is no indication on the site that
the article was heavily modified after it first appeared.
To see how radically this story was
changed after Slashdot
linked to it, check this snapshot of the original, provided by Slashdot reader John Harrold.
The second iteration was more favorable -- or at least less unfavorable --
to Microsoft than the original, but Wastler denies any Microsoft involvement in
the change. "Advertisers do not interfere with our content," he says,
and notes that neither he nor any other CNN/Money editors were contacted by
Microsoft about this story. He does say, though, that the later version was
"more balanced" than the earlier one. In my experience, Microsoft PR people are not capable of reacting to anything as quickly as this story changed, so the chance of a conspiracy here is about zero. As for Wastler's "more balanced" comment, that is his judgement, and you are free to agree or disagree with it. (I'm sure some Slashdot readers will say he is correct, and others will say he is not. Editorial decisions never please everyone.)
"Writethroughs" are Routine in Online News
In the news business, stories that change after the originals run are called "writethroughs." This practice originated with wire services like UPI, AP, and Reuters, who might send subscribing editors a story with the headline, "Office building on fire in downtown Cleveland," followed by one or two paragraphs of copy, with progressively longer versions of the same story coming through the wire, hour by hour, as reporters on the scene gather more information.
Wastler says CNN/Money readers look at his site "like a wire service" and expect stories to change over the course of a day. As an example, during our phone conversation he pointed me to a recently posted CNN/Money story with the headline, U.S. productivity soars, and noted that this story might be updated and expanded several times, so that "by the end of the day, it might become a magazine length feature."
Online News Association President Bruce Koon says, via email, "Writethroughs are very common nowadays among news sites, from MSNBC to CBSMarketWatch to CNN. Pretty standard practice nowadays to freshen headlines and leads as new developments occur. Some sites have labels such as 'update' or 'breaking news' but it varies. For top stories, I don't see that kind of labeling." In his day job, Koon is Executive News Editor for Knight Ridder Digital, so he ought to know.
I was not aware that this practice was routine in the online news business until a few days ago. Old-style wire service writethroughs were as specific as a rigorously kept programmer's changelog, right down to paragraph and line number. Maybe I'm naive, but if I am going to trust a news source, I expect that same level of care in story updates, or at least something like News.com's corrections page, which lets readers know what changes, if any, have been made to published stories before they are archived.
What's the Difference Between an Update and a Correction?
I doubt that most news site readers know the story they are seeing at the moment they read it is not necessarily the same as the story that was published earlier at the same URL -- unless we tell them. We run the risk of getting into the habit of "getting it first" at the expense of "getting it right" if we start thinking, "Well, we can fix it later, so let's go with what we have now even if it's not confirmed as carefully as we'd really like."
This is not the same as running a story that begins by saying something like, "An unconfirmed statement by...," followed by a later story that either confirms or denies the original statement, and it is not the same as an Update notice added to the original story when it is expanded or corrected. At CNN/Money, when a story is updated it gets a fresh time/date stamp, and Wastler says that's plenty. The problem with this is that someone reading the latest version who didn't see the previous one has no way to know that an earlier -- possibly incorrect -- version ever existed.
Columbia University journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan (AKA Sree) says, "You really need to make it clear to your readers if your stories have been changed or updated." He makes his students do that on Columbia's Web sites, even though some of them complain that commercial news sites, where many of them hope to work after graduation, wouldn't necessarily make them take this extra step.
Sree feels strongly that if a Web site changes a news story, for whatever reason, it should put, "'last updated at' or something like that" along with the original publication time and date.
More Analysis of the CNN/Money Story Example
Andrew Nachison, of the American Press Institute's Media Center, took a close look at our original CNN/Money example and gave us this analysis:
The Microsoft trial story on CNN looks like a typical
write-thru of an earlier story, with new information from afternoon events. The
morning's top news, that a Microsoft witness had trouble answering some
questions, got bumped lower in the story as other witnesses testified later in
the day. On its face, no big deal.
However, CNN did a disservice to its audience - especially the audience
paying close attention to that particular story - by failing to explain the
changes. A brief note would have helped, or a link to a journal of update notes
for the story, so users - like newspaper wire editors - could, in a glance,
understand how the story had changed from previous versions. Something else would have helped CNN's audience: if CNN had an obvious, standard policy for publishing update notes that the audience expected and was used to.
What's most remarkable to me is that we're well into the digital publishing era but most digital news providers have yet to develop clear standards for how to handle updates and notes about updates so users are better informed. Publishers need to do this for two reasons: first, to better serve their audiences (which should translate into credibility with the audience) and second, to promote expectations and standards that audiences can come to expect of all credible news providers.
Errors that require corrections add a whole different level of challenge to digital publishing. Today it's virtually impossible to erase a mistake once it's published online. Web browsers call up cached versions stored on hard drives, some sites intentionally archive Web sites for historical research, and Internet service providers like AOL cache popular pages to speed service to customers. So AOL customers may hit a cached version of a story that contains errors corrected in a subsequent version that has yet to be cached by the AOL servers.
If online news publishers truly have their audience's best interests in mind then they should go out of their way to alert the audience to corrections and to make it clear when an update corrects previously published errors. They need to set the record straight.
University of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams has also looked at our example story. She says:
Updating the story in real time without noting that it has
been changed: That's okay by me, in principle. But in this case, it's really
very different.
I would be inclined to believe the Money.CNN folks who told you it's no big
deal -- for them. In other words, I do NOT believe it's sneaky or anything like
that. But for the rest of the world (non-journalists), this MUST be very confusing!
I asked Wastler if CNN/Money had ever thought about archiving older story versions as new ones appeared, and linking from the new versions to the older, archived ones. He said, "The name of the game is speed, getting [stories] up on the site." He talked of the sheer number of stories a site like his publishes daily, and how loading any more work on his editorial staff, like moving old story versions to an archive, "would bog things down." I pointed out that this was something a simple script could do with a single "replace story/move old story to archive" click from an editor, and his reply was, "Well, I am not as technical as you... I don't know about that."
(This was not a hostile conversation. Wastler reads Slashdot now and then and likes it, and says, "My tech guys love Slashdot." Perhaps one of you Slashdot-reading CNN tech guys could talk to Wastler and other CNN editors about automatic story versioning. Wastler said that because of syndication deals and inbound links, his main concern was keeping a stable URL for each story even if went through a series of updates. This should not be hard to arrange.)
Future Directions for Online News
In a followup email, Bruce Koon said the idea of constant story updates on the Internet should not surprise anyone. His exact words:
How is the model different from TV or radio broadcast news?
As news gets reported as it's happening, facts are going to change, new
developments are happening. If anything, we've been trying to get newspapers
away from this notion that they print once. The Internet is about continuous
updates and reporting.
Also, unlike Slashdot or other new forms of information gathering and
reporting, news audiences only go to a news site a few times a day to read what
the latest news is. Most seem to know that the version of the story they're
reading now is different from what they read before, just as they know the top
of the hour report on the radio news may be different from what they heard two
hours earlier.Based on Koon's statement, the long term question seems to be whether Internet news evolution should be based on a broadcast model, with broadcast-style immediacy as its most important goal, or whether it should be based on a print model that assumes we are writing the "first rough draft of history" so that what we say today has archival significance tomorrow.
I think the two patterns are going to coexist, and rather than "convergence" we are going to see a gradual divergence between the two as "Internet news" simply becomes "news" instead of being seen as different or separate from other media. Watching how readers (viewers?) react to this change (assuming they notice it at all) over the next decade or so is going to be interesting.
A big part of the change is going to be figuring out how to maintain audience trust when it is so easy to digitally morph stories, pictures and almost anything else into states that are far different from their original ones. As Nachison points out, despite the apparently transitory nature of online news, nothing on the Internet ever quite goes away. It is all archived or cached somewhere once it gets into digital form, whether it was originally prepared for delivery on the Internet, on printed pages or for cable or over-the-air broadcast.
Professor Sreenivasan says, "We're all in the early days of this business. We need to evolve standards."
That we do. But is the "we" who evolves standards going to be the people who read (or view) the news or is "we" going to be the people who produce it? And that leads to another question: Where will we draw the line between reporters and readers/viewers, or will we even bother to differentiate between them, when PDAs with broadband wireless connections and built-in digital video cameras become common, everyday consumer items?
June 7, 2005
When Web print stories disappear, the meaning of 'archives' fades
·
When an editor pulls stories due to reader complaints or fears of
spreading teen suicides or helping the competition, is the site still the
record of the newspaper? Ethicists and editors decry the practice. By Mark Glaser
If Graham thought it was impossible to do a first draft of history in the
newspaper, imagine how much more impossible he would consider our present time,
when newspaper stories are examined, prodded and picked over on newspaper sites
and in online archives.Now, the struggle over writing and editing the first draft of history includes a little birdie on the shoulders of journalists telling them that their work might live on forever on the global Web -- and not just in a musty morgue or library. While most editors and ethicists believe that every single story that appears in a newspaper should also appear on the paper's Web site and archive, there have been exceptions to the rule.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn't post a recent story on teen suicides on its Web site for two days, the Missoulian (Mont.) took a story about competitor New West off its Web site after a few days, and the San Francisco Chronicle spiked a 1999 story about the Columbine shootings due to complaints about a videogame angle. Plus, after a high-profile lawsuit from freelance writers, many online publications and databases had to pull their stories due to lack of compensation.
In the case of the Post-Intelligencer, reporter Claudia Rowe wrote a sensitive story about three teens who had recently committed suicide in succession over a number of weeks. When Rowe first approached suicide experts in her reporting, they were wary of the possibility that press sensationalism could in turn cause more teen suicides.
"Before the story was printed, we had experts who were nervous that we were even doing the story," said Mark Matassa, city editor at the P-I. "Some of the feedback we were getting was that anytime you write about this, there's a danger of provoking more suicides, which obviously wasn't our intention. But it's also not our intention to not do important journalism because somebody's afraid that someone might take it wrong."
Once the story ran on May 23, however, those same experts were relieved at Rowe's sensitive handling of the material and were satisfied with wider Web distribution. However, the editors held off on posting the story online initially, with the twin concerns that teens were more likely to read it online and that the editors might lose control of where the story was posted and passed around online.
"The initial thinking was that because we were taking so much care with the presentation of the story in the newspaper, if we put it online, we don't have the same control," Matassa told me. "The story gets picked up and moves around the Internet really quickly. We were nervous about presenting the story in a way that allowed us to ensure that we were doing it properly."
This passage, in particular, shows how technology itself played a part in the story: "Technology, it turns out, was central to the way their deaths unfolded," Rowe wrote. "Each boy sent an electronic goodbye to his friends moments before pulling the trigger, and each has since become part of an ongoing cyber conversation among the network of teenagers left behind."
But after two days of holding off on posting the story online, the editors had enough positive feedback to feel comfortable putting it on the Web -- though they included an Editor's Note explaining their thought process.
Editor's Note: This story, published in print editions of the Post-Intelligencer on Monday, May 23, was not immediately posted online primarily because of the effect experts advised us it could have on suicidal teens. After seeing the story, suicide-prevention experts now believe it is responsible and constructive and deserves wider dissemination. For those reasons and after many requests from readers, we reconsidered and are posting Monday's story.
While Matassa is not in charge of what goes online at the Post-Intelligencer's site, he does have a deeper understanding of how the Web's extension of a print story's life affects the work done on the front end.
"Even more so, you better make darn sure your stories are right, that they're smart, thoughtful stories, they quote people accurately, you get the facts right and aren't making stuff up -- all those things that you expect journalists to do," he said. "Especially because they're living online for eternity and beyond, that ought to doubly get your attention."
Aiding and abetting the enemy in Montana?
Not all cases of spiked stories online involve sensitive social issues or court-ordered removals, however. In Missoula, Montana, the daily Missoulian newspaper rules supreme. When the upstart New West grassroots media Web site came to town, the reigning daily refused to sell classified job ads to the startup.
Then Missoulian business reporter Robert Struckman did an in-depth story on New West in March and interviewed its founder and editor in chief, Jonathan Weber. The story was approved by Missoulian publisher John VanStrydonck and appeared in print and on the newspaper's Web site. However, a few days later, the story inexplicably disappeared from the site and searches for keywords brought up nothing.
Weber suspects the publisher was upset with positive coverage of a competing outlet and had it pulled online.
"It's sort of like trying to pretend that it was never there, some kind of rewriting of history," Weber told me. "It's kind of peculiar and not an appropriate thing to do. We had a story about something a guy had written on his personal Weblog, and we did a story about this, and when the guy realized we were doing a story, he took his Web site down. But we found the site in the Google cache so he wasn't actually able to expunge his Web site. So you can't really fully expunge something from the Internet."
In fact, the story is far from expunged from the Net. Weber had e-mailed a copy of the Missoulian article to a friend and had that copy to post on New West. He then used the whole embarrassing episode as the basis of a second-person screed about VanStrydonck's thinking.
"It's harder to control the pesky journalists in your own newsroom," Weber wrote. "They actually go out and do a story about one of those new competing publications, granting it far more publicity and business advantage than it ever could have gotten from the advertisement that you so shamelessly refused to run. But God forbid you try to tell them what they can and can't run. It's not like the old days, when the Missoulian was a wholly-owned mouthpiece of Montana's copper magnates. Now you have to appear editorially upright. Reporters and editors can piss and moan and run stories that undermine your business strategy. At least you can order the offending story expunged from the archives!"
Despite repeated phone calls and e-mails, VanStrydonck and Struckman refused to comment for my story, leaving Weber's screed and posting of the Missoulian story as the last word on it. However, there's one interesting aspect of the Case of the Disappearing Business Profile: The Missoulian Web site itself is far from comprehensive when it comes to posting print stories online. Due to cutbacks or lack of interest, the site is not a complete archive of print material, undercutting the newspaper's own online authority on its reporting.
When complaints spiked a story
There was a time not that long ago when newspaper Web sites were almost completely off the radar for newspaper executives. At the old San Francisco Chronicle -- pre-Hearst buyout -- the SFGate online arm was run completely separately with almost no input from print editors.
It was in those days, in April 1999, that the newspaper ran a story about the Columbine High (Colorado) shooters that combined wire services with a staff byline, Jaxon Vanderbeken. Vanderbeken's reporting included quotes from a police expert on Goths, Sergeant Dave Williams from the Dayton, Ohio, police department. One particular passage relating to Williams raised the hackles of videogamers:
"Sergeant Williams says some Goths act out a bizarre and elaborate role-playing game, 'Vampire: The Masquerade.' He said one particularly dark aspect of the Gothic is when role playing is carried to extreme. 'The game -- Vampire: The Masquerade -- I call it Dungeons and Dragons on steroids,' he said, adding that players assume the persona of vampires and act out attacks. 'There are people who I have seen who lose touch, who think the gaming system and mythos are real. They have gone off and done some very strange things. Basing things on my experience, is there a propensity for this? It's possible.'"
The publisher of the "Vampire" game, White Wolf, lashed out at the Chronicle's coverage with a press release. The Chronicle itself ran a longer, more thoughtful story which included interviews with teens who consider themselves to be Goths and who play the game "Vampire" but don't make the connection to violence.
But even after all those moves, the SFGate continued to get complaints about its first story on the subject. The paper finally pulled the story from its archives and left a note up on the original URL saying, "This story was removed by the San Francisco Chronicle. A subsequent story on the same subject can be found at the following URL [pointing to the later story]."
"[After White Wolf] linked to the story, we heard impassioned complaints from HUNDREDS of kids -- even after we corrected the story and said there was no evidence that [the shooters] ever played those games," said SFGate editor Vlae Kershner via e-mail. "After a few weeks, we got tired of taking the heat and took down the story. I should add that under our current corrections policy, if the same thing occurred again we'd correct the mistake online and annotate the article as corrected, but we would not delete it."
Though the story isn't in SFGate's archives, you can find a full copy of it on an Italian gaming site. So even the best efforts of expunging the past run into trouble online, where so many people can cut and paste text elsewhere and the Wayback Machine can archive it all.
An eternal life for plagiarism
While these examples deal with controversial subjects either with the public at large or within the newspaper's management, what about all those plagiarized and problematic stories penned by Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today? You might be surprised to learn that all those stories remain intact in those newspapers' archives as well as databases such as LexisNexis -- but with large editor's notes at the top of them. (Perhaps most bizarrely you have to pay to read an archived version of Blair's fabricated stories at NYTimes.com.)
USA Today, the New York Times and Washington Post all adhere to a pretty simple guideline to online posting of print stories: If it ran in print, it's part of the public record and must run online. USAToday.com vice president and editor in chief Kinsey Wilson said that even a made-up story by Kelley about vigilantes among Israeli settlers is still available online with a detailed correction at the top.
"In that case, as well as in other less egregious cases where stories are found to contain inadvertent factual errors, our practice is to append an editor's note or a correction rather than purge the story from our online archive," Kinsey said via e-mail. "I can't rule out the possibility that we might remove a story from our servers under certain circumstances -- a finding of libel, for example, or a simple production error that led to content being published in error. But as a rule we do not think the public or our readers are served by 'disappearing' stories that have been vetted, published and then later found to be problematic."
Online research databases also strive to keep the public record complete. Judy Schultz, spokeswoman for LexisNexis, says that it's a very rare occurrence when stories are pulled and mainly under court orders such as for the freelance writers who sued.
"I think [pulling stories] is something that would be negotiated," Schultz told me. "One of our aims is to create an archive of publications. Once something's in print, you can't really take it back. I'm trying to leave you with the impression that we would not normally do that. The only time that I know we have removed anything from our service was when the freelance writers sued the New York Times and us and other sources...In the normal course of business, we would leave the original story in with the correction."
The Post-Intelligencer's Matassa doesn't believe in that blanket rule, however, and thinks of the Web as more than just an online archive for static copy.
"I don't think you need to leave the wrong version on there for a historical record," Matassa said. "I think you want to have the right story living on. If you do a story that you determine is false or the source cannot be verified, the wise thing to do is take them off. I think of online as more than microfiche. It's a publishing venue that continues publishing. That's different than something you check out of a library to look up and see what ran on a given day."
But ethicists believe that appended corrections are appropriate -- in most cases. Stephen Ward, associate professor of journalism ethics at the School of Journalism at University of British Columbia, told me that online is indeed a different animal than microfiche but that archives should be just what they mean: the original record preserved. Ward thinks that a correction would even lessen a libel threat. He points to one example in Canada of how spiked online stories could hurt the public at large.
"In 2004, the National Post carried a small correction saying a medical reporter had been dismissed for a series of fabricated quotes and sources in a number of stories," Ward said via e-mail. "The newspaper assured the readers that no false 'medical' information had been provided. But questions arose later as to whether, in fact, questionable medical information had been provided via the fabricated stories. When an ethics researcher tried to research these stories and these claims, he found that many of the stories had been removed entirely from the paper's archives, making it more difficult to identify and obtain the original stories."
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, agrees with the general principle of running all print stories online with corrections noted. But she does see some gray areas.
"A story that causes obvious harm to an individual should probably come down," McBride said via e-mail. "For instance, if you wrote a story that accused me of child neglect, and then you discover that you got it wrong, it wouldn't be enough to just put an editor's note at the top of the story that said: This story is erroneous. Because the accusation would be very harmful to me. That said, it makes me nervous when stories just disappear. I think the most responsible way to handle that is allow a site search engine to search the copy as if it was there. But then when the user calls up the story, he gets an editor's note which explains why the story is not there but does not repeat the harm that was caused by the original erroneous report."
But Ward's point still stands. If you were the subject of such a harmful story, would you want the story expunged with a vague note about what happened, or would you want the original copy there to clarify exactly what was written? These are the types of things that drive editors nuts, keep ethicists up at night and ultimately mean less and less on the Net where a page posted for a few hours can live on for eternity.
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