Yesterday’s “Don’t delete that tweet” post occasioned a great debate in the comments. (Go read it now if you haven’t, then come back for my thoughts.)

There are valid cases on both sides of this issue. It seems to me that how you come down depends on the relative weight you choose to place on (a) the short-term benefit of restricting the repetition of erroneous information vs. (b) the long-term benefit of preserving the integrity of a historical record and the accountability of a news source.

Danny Sullivan’s argument for deletion is sensible. The screenshot tactic is intriguing but, as Paul Watson points out, a screenshot is a poor substitute for the original data in context. Given the current state of Twitter technology and tools, I wouldn’t fault any news provider for deciding to delete an erroneous tweet, provided some good-faith effort was made to admit the error rather than hide it.

But — as someone who immersed himself for several years in the history of blogging — I can’t help viewing this subject in the longer context of the evolution of Web media. And the pattern here is hard to miss.

Every new style of online participation is born dangling from a “just.” It’s “just” a tweet, so why bother worrying about deleting it? But every wave of Internet-based communication that preceded Twitter arrived on the scene with a similar sense that it was more ephemeral than what preceded it. Save your e-mail? Why bother? Hey, edit your Web page at will — it’s just data on a server!

Each time, we gradually discover that what we thought was casual has become an essential part of the record of our time. And each time we scramble, belatedly, to retrofit some responsibility onto our practices. Maybe this time we can at least shorten that cycle.

Public tweets play an increasingly important role in our news ecosystem. They tell stories and are part of the story, too. We should minimize tampering with them. We need better tools that might let us correct them responsibly, whether this takes the form of fixes auto-propagating to retweeters or correction notices or revision tracking or all of the above.

In the meantime, we’ll all need to keep improvising. As we do, I hope we’ll all think twice before deleting.

VALUABLE CONTEXT: NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard has a great column documenting how the incorrect reports of Gabrielle Giffords’ death started. (Hint: It wasn’t Twitter.)

Over the weekend many news organizations reported, erroneously, that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was dead. These reports don’t seem to have originated on Twitter. But many spread there — and now they’re occasioning a round of head-scratching over how to handle retractions and corrections in this new communications format.

This happens with every new phase of communications-technology evolution. Twitter, with its speed and popularity and intermingling of professional and personal channels, presents some modest new challenges to accuracy practices. But for journalists there should be little confusion about the answers.

At Lost Remote, Steve Safran writes:

We ask: is deleting a tweet after the fact a lack of transparency, especially if any subsequent tweets don’t admit the error? Is a news organization obliged to tweet that it was wrong? Does the retweet function make such actions moot? We strongly believe in transparency, as do many of you. But whether deleting tweets is a responsibility or not, and whether a news organization must tweet that it was wrong, should lead to serious discussions in all newsrooms.

For a private individual using Twitter, it might make sense to delete a message that you later discovered was in error. But for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated — sometimes called “scrubbing” — always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened.

The folks at WBUR have it just right:

We have decided NOT to delete the erroneous tweet, because it serves as part of the narrative of this story. Facts can change fast when news is breaking, and that leads to errors. We need to own the error, not hide from it. But we also need to rectify the error and explain ourselves to people who trust us. Deleting the tweet would do more to harm trust than preserving it would do to harm truth.

According to the chief argument in favor of tweet-deletion, if you leave a bad report lying around your feed, you’re tempting others to retweet it; if you delete, you’ll inhibit this viral repetition of misinformation. That’s a reasonable position. But there are alternatives to simply zapping the bad tweet and scrubbing the record.

The same technologies that force these problems on us can also help us solve them. On the Web, for instance, publishers can use versioning tools to keep a corrected edition of a story front and center while maintaining a trail of accountability. Similarly, Twitter users can use Twitter itself to correct the record while preserving it.

For instance: say your newsroom had sent out a tweet that read, as NPR’s did:

BREAKING: Rep. Giffords (D-AZ), 6 others killed by gunman in Tucson

You could send out a followup message, preserving a record of the error while correcting it:

CORRECTION Giffords wounded, in critical condition RT @NPR BREAKING: Rep. Giffords (D-AZ), 6 others killed by gunman in Tucson

Then you could reasonably go back and delete the original. This might be a useful tactic to curtail the spread of bad info. But it still flattens the record a bit, since the original message’s timestamp (and possibly other contextual data) would vanish.

Better yet is the idea floated by “Being Wrong” author Kathryn Schulz (@wrongologist) in this Poynter interview by Mallary Jean Tenore: “Why not have a ‘correct’ function (like the ‘reply’ and ‘retweet’ functions) that would automatically send a correction to everyone who had retweeted something that contained an error?”

Such a tool would dragoon the engine of viral misinformation back into the service of truth. You can say, “Hey, it’s just Twitter, what’s the big deal,” but experience suggests that arguments about Internet tools that begin with “It’s just” will get disproved over time. Twitter is beginning to mature into the rapid-response nervous system of our news world. It needs and ought to have a function like the one Schulz proposes.

BONUS LINK: Craig Silverman has a valuable roundup of links relating to errors in Tucson shooting coverage.

[I've continued discussing this topic in a followup post.]

The biennial midterm in American politics is almost always a time of turnover in presidential administrations. Appointees may be out of favor, or frustrated, or tired, or just eager to make some money; they leave. Elections that deliver a drubbing to the administration’s party, like our most recent one, make this sort of change even more likely.

All of which means there’s nothing too surprising or tumultuous about White House personnel change on the scale that we’re seeing this week — with the departures of President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs and political adviser David Axelrod, both of whom will continue to work on behalf of the president but from a greater distance, and the appointment of a new chief of staff and chief economic adviser. As Marc Ambinder wrote at the National Journal, the changes leave the president with “a different — but strangely familiar — cast of advisers, some playing new roles.”

So is this the big White House shake-up the Wall Street Journal promised us two months ago?

On the eve of the election, a Journal story offered dire warnings of just such an event, leaving a distinct impression of drawn knives and imminent bloodletting. Soon after, a MediaBugs error report raised a big red flag over the piece.

Here was the gist of the Journal piece: “Some high-level Democrats are calling for President Barack Obama to remake his inner circle or even fire top advisers in response to what many party strategists expect to be a decisive defeat on Tuesday.” A perfectly plausible notion. But, as our bug filer pointed out, the Journal offered not a single actual high-level Democrat — named or otherwise — calling on Obama to fire anyone.

Usually, when an inside-the-Beltway story reports a looming event without any evidence, the explanation is that some political insider has leaked the information on background. It’s then up to reporters and editors to decide whether the leak is a real story that readers deserve to hear about (usually, this means finding confirming sources), or a self-serving maneuver on the part of the leaker. In other words, is the scoop real, or is the press being manipulated?

Unfortunately, all the incentives in our current media environment push the newsroom to publish the rumor either way. Doing so seizes attention and stirs discussion. If it turns out to be a real story, great; if it turns out to be part of some manipulative corridors-of-power kabuki, well, so what? Your news organization will rarely pay a price for donning a mask and assuming a role in that shadow play. The world will forget and move on.

In this case, if Obama, fast on the heels of the election, had announced an administration-insiders’ bloodbath, firing people like Axelrod and confidante Valerie Jarrett, then the Journal could credibly say, “See? We got the story right. Sorry we couldn’t tell you how at the time!” Media critics might still bridle at the story’s technique, but the newspaper could reasonably argue that the public interest was served.

But the shake-up never materialized. There was no chorus of Democratic party establishment types demanding one. Instead, there’s just been some standard-issue midterm turnover — which the Journal, like other news organizations, has covered without reference to its previous story. And we’ll never know who, exactly, was trying to serve what purpose in the days before the election of spreading a portrait of infighting in the West Wing.

After some effort on MediaBugs’ part, we received a response from the Journal’s assistant managing editor to the MediaBugs report. She disputed its premise, maintaining that the story was “solid and complete.” That’s where the issue stands; we’ve closed the bug out (as we do after two months) as “unresolved.”

MediaBugs itself doesn’t offer a ruling on “who’s right.” If you’re interested, you can go read the Journal story, read the bug report, and decide for yourself.

This process may not provide satisfaction to the critics of a media report or vindication for the journalists involved. But it does leave what I think is a useful and valuable public record of the disagreement, more organized and authoritative than a simple blog post. Over time, a repository of such records might restore some accountability for misconceived stories — and even begin to reverse the tide of public distrust in the media.