David Carr’s profile of Hollywood gossip blogger Nikki Finke contained two statements that I thought shouldn’t stand without challenge.
She isn’t always right and, as her critics have pointed out, she’s not above using the new-media prerogative of going into her archives and changing the bad call to a good one…
[Patrick Goldstein] hastens to add that Ms. Finke has gone into her own archive to correct errors. Bill Wyman, who blogs at Hitsville.org, documented an instance in which she altered a previous post about a director getting a job, then took credit for a scoop when it turned out to be somebody else.
Ms. Finke said both men were wrong on the specifics and each had a personal vendetta against her, a frequent theme whenever criticism of her work came up. She does say that she considers Web articles to be living things, reflecting “the latest information I have received.â€
Yes, Web articles are “living things,” and they can and often are updated and fixed. But no responsible Web journalist makes substantive changes in copy after the fact without leaving a record — a strikeout, a note in the text indicating a change or update was made, or something like that. No one who self-identifies as an online journalist claims the right to make such invisible rewrites as a “new media prerogative.”
To admirers and detractors, she is the perfect expression of the Web’s original premise, which suggested that a lone obsessive could own the conversation.
The “Web’s original premise” was that if you created a simple standard for linked hypertext documents, people and institutions would add content and build a global repository of information. Tim Berners-Lee had no particular interest, as far as I know in empowering “lone obsessives” or helping anyone “own” the “conversation.”