Last month, the hardworking gang at Politico got into a dustup with critics after an editor made a change in an already-posted story. The story was about the Rolling Stone/General McChrystal affair; the change removed a phrase that described how beat reporting works; the phrase had drawn considerable attention, and so did its disappearance.
I’m not going to add to the volume of commentary on that affair. I’m interested here in the larger issue of the mutability of online content, and how responsible news organizations deal with it.
A story posted at Slate yesterday sheds considerable light on this issue, in the course of making a few stumbles of its own. (The story includes quotes from a recent post I wrote about best practices in online corrections.) It’s remarkable that, after 15 years of Web publishing experience, we haven’t gotten better at handling changes to news published online. Before this post is done, I will offer a straightforward, concrete proposal for doing so.