Online News Stories that Change Behind Your Back 309
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?
This is not a newspaper (Score:1, Interesting)
1984 reference yet again (Score:5, Interesting)
but that was one of the central ideas of the book, news articles, etc, being
changed after the fact. If you went back and did any research, you would find
that the news agency/authority in charge of information was always right.
In more mundane terms, you really have to wonder about a news agency that
changes it's story and doesn't even post a retraction.
SealBeater
maybe slashdot should do this (Score:1, Interesting)
So if they don't correct it, then readers have to read thru the comments so an astute comment can correct the "editor" incompetence.
Maybe slashdot should adopt the practice of updating the stories so it tells the truth. I see nothing wrong with news sites doing this. Better to get it right, than wrong.
Orwell's 1984 (Score:2, Interesting)
And Orwell didn't invent this himself - this is precisely what the Soviet system did back in the days of Stalin. Whenever yet another party big shot "turned out to be the Soviet people enemy", i.e. convicted in yet another truth-mocking trial, he was carefully removed from all the old newspapers, books and especially school textbooks. It's amazing to think just how much images with Trotsky were edited in that manner...
Re:This is not a newspaper (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the first time... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1984 reference yet again (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is fairly amusing... (Score:2, Interesting)
Really? I haven't seen this before. Have any links to specific articles?
How many times have we seen articles mystically updated and changed here without any mention of the revision on the actual article?
Everytime a slashdot article is updated by the editors there is a bold faced UPDATE notice with a timestamp next to it, such as in this article [slashdot.org]. It seems obvious to me that they are trying to inform readers when an article changes.
I mean they actually posted 6 Anti Microsoft stories in a SINGLE day on Monday.
What does that have to do with anything?
Personal attacks on the slashdot editors do you no good. You don't have to read it if you don't want to.
Minor or major issue? (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's say that a writer for WSJ reports that Cisco has done major cuts to it's overhead in a story three days ago. If you invest in Cisco, this would peque your interest. You might even realize that the primary way companies have cut overhead is to get rid of either part of their development team, or part of their support team. Either solution may provide you the impetus to sell part of your stock, as they both lead you to the conclusion that they have made a short term profit decision that will negatively impact long term results.
A day later Cisco reports a major increase in profits as a result of their decision to cut overhead. The stock jumps 18% the next day.
You decide to go take a look at the story again, and find that now the URL returns a story by a different author with glowing reports of the profitability of the company.
If you sold your stock before the quarterly results posted, you took a major hit on the potential for your earnings for the stock. The new story does not support your decision. The decision to sell was yours, but it was guided by a story that you can't find anymore, and because of the newspaper's guidelines stating that it is ok to "revise without notification" stories on-line, you are left holding the bag, and even more skeptical of what you read online.
There are only two possible solutions to this that I can see. Either the online newspapers take responsibility and provide notification to the readers that the stories they may be relying upon have been updated, or some tool needs to be developed that will allow a user to flag stories for monitoring that will notify them if the story has been updated.
Unfortunately either will impact the newspaper's bandwidth.
Then again, I don't own stock in Cisco, (though I should get some) so at the moment such a story would not directly impact me.
-Rusty
Samething with the spacejunk story from CNN. (Score:1, Interesting)
Links:
Revised article (404'd):
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/05/0
Old article:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/04/2
Slashdot Story:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/
Space.com coverage of same story(from time frame of original CNN article):
http://www.space.com/news/aiaa_report_
http://space.com/news/spaceagencies/orbital_de
Re:Attn: Slashdot (Score:1, Interesting)
MORON
Re:This is fairly amusing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even better, this thread is now locked so you can no longer post to it.
There were MANY insightful comments in that thread, but the editors chose to -1 all of it anyway, in effect "revising" history; their excuse being that the thread was "offtopic". Interesting isn't it? Some of the *best* discussions on
The reason *that* particular thread was bitchslapped is abundantly clear. Go read it for yourself, and decide.
And if *THIS* post is deemed offtopic by the editors, you can bet on me losing whatever respect I had left for
Sure, bitchslapping isn't OUTRIGHT censorship, but enough people assume (like the parent poster) that the editors don't mod on such a virulent, malicious scale that in effect, a -1 is almost as bad as real censorship, given the number of us that *DEPEND* on the readership's judgement on what is a good post and what isn't. If what
Ethical Journalism (Score:3, Interesting)
Modifying an article after publication is acceptable -- and it's a Good Thing if the revision fixes errors or omissions.
Modifying an article and not telling anyone is a Bad Thing called a "lie."
A case in point: Yesterday, I posted a benchmark comparison [coyotegulch.com] of Intel's "non-commercial" C++ compiler and gcc. Several people gave me suggestions for improving gcc's performance, and I updated the article today -- with clearly marked additions and explanations of what changed and why. That's journalism on the web.
What CNET is doing is called lying.
Re:This is not a newspaper (Score:2, Interesting)
No Conspiracy Here, The Web's A Dynamic Medium (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's How It Works
Unless things have changed drastically since I worked there, there are half a dozen people in Arlington, VA right now who spend the majority of their day watching the wire services for updates, posting updated stories and sometimes adding information (in which case the byline is changed to something to the effect of "Compiled from staff and wire reports").
Some stories may be updated five times or more in a single day, but many get stale before they can be updated so the Post stops linking to them. A classic case of a story that is constantly updated is the market summary. AP and Reuters run this story each morning and update it as things develop (updates include a new snapshot of the Dow and the Nasdaq, highlight any major announcements/reports that may have affected the tide of the markets, etc.) about once an hour, IIRC.
If the Post expects people will be following a particular story throughout the day, the site will highlight the fact that it's been updated. Any time they update a story, they change the time stamp. If you're following a story, take note of the time stamp and you'll always know if you're looking at an updated version (I'm sure Slashdot readers would prefer a changelog, but newspapers aren't software development houses and they are very resistant to change).
No Conspiracy Here
There's no conspiracy here to change facts behind your back or cover up mistakes. It's about ensuring that you always have the most up-to-date information when you visit the site. Here's the deal:
When The Washington Post is physically printed each morning, it's distributed to hundreds of thousands of locations. Some quickly find their way to recycling bins and trash cans, but others may sit in people's offices or homes for months. More importantly, libraries archive the papers and they are provided to the public indefinitely as reference material.
The Web, OTOH, is a dynamic medium where few things have a long shelf life. Most content on washingtonpost.com is no longer linked to within 24 hours, and the actual HTML page disappears after two weeks unless it's designated as long-term content. The searchable archives consist of stories that have been printed in the physical paper, and if a change is made to a print edition article, it is noted with a correction.
And now you know enough about the online news biz to get a part-time job updating the news digest. All that remains is some basic HTML knowledge and a tutorial about proprietary Web publishing systems (news judgment skills optional).
Um, no they don't... (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's how it goes, and has done so "forever", in most electronic news services...
Follow-ons may have an indicator suggesting which "take" this item is. This is the orderly disclosure of news as it develops, as mentioned in the story. So, as an IBM announcment is being read, you might see...
IBM earnings Company says econ improved greatly
IBM earnings -2- up 1.00 over last year
IBM earnings -3- revenue up 20%
But, the systems also allow stories to be deleted, replaced, or changed post-publication. Rarely, if ever, is there any indication this has happened, or what those changes were. Most contracts even prohibit distributors from keeping, or indicating, what changes were made.
As a rule, this is done so bad info can be retracted/corrected as quickly as possible. This limits potential damages from libel, since a real-time fix demonstrates both lack of intent and minimizes the number of people that view bad v. correct data. Sometimes, but not always, the story will indicate the story you're viewing is a correction for a previous one you may have read.
How this is used is a matter of editorial discretion. Some companies, like Bloomberg, Reuters, Dow Jones, and AP are pretty good about using the tools appropriately. They usually indicate when matrial changes (other than spelling/grammer) have been made in the story text itself. The worst case is story deletes, you never know when "I saw XYZ on the services" will make you a lier.
But, as in all matters of discretion, some ompanies have, well, a little less integrity than others.
Although I'm sure it's happened, I don't think I've seen the reputable services make a practice of "re-drafting" a story post-pub.
Not that this would change much. In this case, Microsoft may not have made a phone call, but the re-draft was quite likely a matter of the existing business sensibilities with MSFT. "Final Readers" in the better services would have simply rejected the story pre-pub, and pushed it back into the process, for a re-write in that "more balanced" way.
ANTI-SEMITE (I'm not, but you're a moron) (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, that has nothing to do with the current debate. First, Chomsky earns a living as a linguistics professor. Even though some of his theories have been questioned, there is no doubt that he remains one of the most influential person in the field. Second, about his political activism sideline (which has quite a following, notwithstanding your uneducated appraisal): I guess you've read some of his writing in order to talk about him with such assurance. Could you please give us an example (with links) of his anti-semitism (his words, mind you, not what some have said about him). You can find a lot of his writing online here [zmag.org]. You can also show us an example of his hate for Western Culture, his racism and his "narrow-minded, hate-based dialogue." You should have no trouble identifying the latter if you find it, seeing as how you so aptly use it yourself.
BTW, Sharon was judged to be inderectly responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila by his own government...so, if you're criticizing this, I guess this makes you an anti-semite too! Boy, this is fun!
Re:More disturbing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Boy, what an argument! I'm speechless!! If it makes you feel any better, I thing you're full of crap too. But, as usual with conservatives who badmouth Chomsky, you won't try to prove him wrong - just call him a liar or weak debater or whatever. But I never see anyone actually trying to challenge one of his arguments...strange...
And I really would like to see him ripped to shreds as he deserves in a fair and open and widely publicised debate.
Yesterday I was looking again at the interview dear old William F. Buckley did of him in the 60's. Someone got ripped to shreds all right, but it wasn't Chomsky. It's actually painful to watch. At some point I though that Buckley would just burst into tears and storm out of the studio. Pathetic.
And in the case of Chomsky - he may have a point, but it's weak, and supported by a lot of left wing propaganda and lies.
Actually, the great thing about Chomsky is that he always gives his sources to support his arguments (in his books, at least). So you can always go and check for yourself. And you know what? Often the sources are traditional, "respected" (and by that I mean "corporate") media. Again, it's not enough to say that it's based on "left-wing propaganda and lies", you have to prove it. Otherwise you're just indulging in propaganda yourself. As I said, if he is so full of crap - as you and about every other conservative like to say - then prove him wrong with the same diligence and seriousness as he uses in his political writing. Otherwise your argument won't carry much weight, I'm afraid.
Re:More disturbing... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, the U.S. did commit acts which by its own standards would be considered terrorism, IMO. Chief amongst them would be the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They could have just vaporized one of the many uninhabited islands surrounding Japan (after inviting some Generals to check out the actual drop) and the effect would have pretty much been the same. At least it would have given the Japanese a chance to think it over while sparing the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, including children and the elderly. Well, it still would have been terrorism (which is the use of force or violence to coerce a civilian population for political or military ends), but at least some civilian lives could have been spared.