Slashdot Mirror
Online News Stories that Change Behind Your Back
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?
And this, kiddies, is why traditional media is best. You can't go back and change yesterday's newspapers.
"Information wants to be paid"
story changing constantly without making note of it... sounds hella like 1984 to me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As far as websites, if you read, for example, the business news feeds on finance.yahoo.com you will see exactly the same thing.
I guess it's more just a matter of convenience for consumer-oriented websites to ignore the details.
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Same thing happened in Orwell's 1984. Say what you want, mod me as you like,
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
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
I don't think that news that is proven incorrect should just be changed. If it's news that's being reported, I think it should stay as is, but with corrections added. Authors should at least note that the original story has been modified.
42
Changning a story to give it a difference balance is if nothing else on the slightly scummy side.
If they want to add more information or change the view of the story than what they should do is:
1) Post a short summary while they still don't know all the facts.
2) On the same page, but clearly timestamped, the later facts or views.
This would allow news sites to keep their integrity and change their minds. Also, the internet is a fluid medium, the old rules of printing on paper don't apply. Dynamic stories probably take more effort but are in the end more satisfying.
At least I understand now why the offical citation for the internet includes the time downloaded to the closest second.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Slashdot. Pot. Kettle. Black. Rinse. Repeat.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I can understand why CNN thinks this is no big deal. CNN was (and is) primarily a TV news station. On TV news, there is no archive or changelog for writethroughs: the copy gets rewritten, and the reporter or anchor reads it on the air. The only way you notice the changes is if you happened to see a previous version of the story earlier in the day.
CNN obviously sees the web as a translation of their TV news business, rather than as a translation of a print-news wire service business, so to them it seems fine! To them the web is a transient medium, like TV, not a fixed medium like print.
Of course, at first glance this seems fine, until linking of stories factors into the equation.
Of course, there are technological solutions to this, but getting CNN to adopt them could be a challenge, because it means converting them from a TV mindset to a print mindset.
I don't see why this is an issue at all.
At the end of the day if a given source provide their take on a story then that's their take. Whether their first take, last take or whatever best matches your own views seems irrevelant.
If there any indication that a bews source changed it's story due to outside pressure than that would of course affect their credibility, but you'd be naieve not to think that there were biases, angles and prudent decisions built into the way any story is reported.
Prior to the immediately-updating news requirements caused by the 9/11 attacks, CNN had a very reasonable method for dealing with this.
The initial story created had an URL like http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news/07/07/harrypot
A very good system IMO which allowed one to link to a specific version of an article, and allowed the reader to see the progress and revisions of a story if they were smart enough to notice the numbers at the top. As long as their internal database stayed up to date, the front page always linked to the latest version.
During and after 9/11, articles were updated so frequently that the major stories (on all news sites) became "newest information" pages rather than articles per-se. Since then, I've noticed hardly any articles posted using the old systems, with revisions now being made in place.
CNN please bring back the old method! It made sense and was a fair method of dealing with this issue!
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I read both versions. The first was skewed heavily towards the performance of one witness in the trial.
The second was a much more well-reasoned discussion of the case as a whole vs. one tiny piece of it.
So what's the problem? The second story seems to be better-written and easier to read, and contains more information.
It's not like they changed the facts of the story; just the scope and the level of detail.
As an aside, does anyone else find it funny that a site that claims to be "News for Nerds", yet claims they shouldn't be handle to any journalistic standards, thinks that they have the right to call other news services on minor issues like this? At least those folks are trying.
...are (admittedly controversial) articles that are posted on a major news web site, then taken off a few days later, like this one, or this other one. This is a dangerous trend, and asks a sensitive question: why "remove" stories instead of putting out counter-arguments? Freedom of speech has it that you can say anything (almost: libel and slander are not acceptable), but anyone can challenge what you say by bringing their own arguments to the discussion. Too often, though, the american media silences alternative viewpoints by excluding them from the debate, so that the public doesn't even know they existe. Case in point: how come Chomsky hasn't been invited to present his views about the 9/11 events on television? If his arguments are so weak as the conservative pundits claim, why not simply try to prove him wrong on the air? Well, there's a good answer to that: they can't, and they know it. So they just ignore his existence altogether, and immediately try to discredit him (without ever challenging his arguments) whenever he is mentioned. Quite revealing...
Reminder: find a new sig
While going through college, one of my classmates had a friend who was a sport reporter for a major wire news service, and he (the reporter) had to write the news as it was happening from TWO different perspectives, and the one that got used would depend on which team won.
It's a common practice in sport websites that provide live coverage, like the one I frequent most, Sportsline.com that the lead story is often written and rewritten during the course of a live game, depending on how it progresses. That's sometimes the price you have for near-real-time news.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
For finally showing slashdot what it takes to create a real news story. While I do find it amusing that slashdot engages in the same practices that you seem to rebel against here, I think its actually quite impressive that:
:-)
/. I can only hope that the other editors learn from your example and attempt to follow suit.
(1) Actual research was done by a slashdot employee for this article. Roblimo actually took the time to call a CNN employee and allow them to confirm/deny the allegations at hand.
(2) Roblimo doesnt appear to jump to any "off the wall" conspiracy conclusions as some editors here have been known to do. He leaves that for the comment posters to do
(3) The article is very balanced all in all. I think Roblimo is attempting to present both sides of the story and give the reader a chance to make up his own mind. Now that is true journalism.
In short thank your Roblimo for helping to raise the bar here at
J
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
The ministry of truth did just that - changing yesterday newspapers based on what the today's party official line was.
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...
VKh
If you look at the story that's still there :
ThreeHamsWillKillHim writes "Apparently, it's rumored that actor James Doohan, from Star Trek fame, is in a coma." The article notes that he's not likely to come out of it. James Doohan is 82 and is known best for his role as Engineer Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott on Star Trek.
Basically, the record of Slashdot's original comment is still there. They did however change the headline - which I presume was to stop thousands of people posting "No he's not." or "Oh my god!" unnecessarily. The line isn't exactly blurred in these matters : You have to keep a record that you were originally wrong, and then add an update. Changing the headline can be interpreted as dubious though, although in the case it's just confusing as the headline is contradicted by the story, and then the story is contradicted by the update. Personally I think the change of headline should be noted along with the update.
The net isn't a newspaper, but on the other hand, that site claims (C) for it's news bits. That means that they are obliged by the law to provide to the public domain the article (ok... after 25 years). Failure to do that means that the article isn't copyrighted at all. Where is the archive of the older version?
Many papers (larger ones) have a series of runs that are printed at varying times. There are also often local editions. Thus I may get the early-am run and you might get the late morning one. Or I may get the downtown edition and you the suburban.
Any of these papers might vary from the others. The story "Sun Rises" might become "Sun Rises Brightly". Or it might be replaced with "Grass Grows" or something else completely different.
No, what you've read or clipped out doesn't magically go back and erase or rewrite itself but it is also quite possibly not the same as everyone else in the classroom / office / nursing home read.
I agree a versioning system would be great for newpspers. Heck, many (incl. large ones like the Boston Globe) lack stable URLS for daily stories for the move from current to archived.
I also respect that this additionial material would be likely disturb readers who prefer their news solid and immutable and would be unhappy to see the changes a story they're reading has gone through. Seeing how the facts evolve and the wroters tone changes, perhaps dramatically.
And yes there is the problem of links pointing to stale versions of a story, the extra material to be stored, indexed, & archived, etc.
Versioning is a good idea and one I've heard brought up many times but to date the practice seems to follow the print style. Declare the last edition of a run the definitive one, the final version of a story the actual story.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The following took place on the tube, not the web: After the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up, killing the crew and school teacher Chirsta McAuliffe, I saw a news story several times on Headline News where a particular insurance company had issued a 1 Million Dollar policy to her, and would now have to pay off on it. It just so happened that my ex was the executive secretary to the president of the company. I spoke with her by phone shortly after seeing the story, and mentioned it to her. She totally freaked out, "How did you know that?" That's not public knowledge!". I told her I saw it on CNN Headline News, She made a rapid exit and promised she would call me back in a little while. The insurance company concentrated on business insurance and usually didn't handle individual policies. She called back about an hour later thanking me for the heads up. The story never appeared again. I asked her about it and all she would say was "It was handled."
They do this on slashdot all the time. I kept the original article on slashdot about the September 11 attacks up for a few days because it had changed so much. The original seemed to express more shock than the final version.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I mean how many times have we caught the editors modding down hundreds of posts in single threads to -1 just because they were critical of the way things were down here at slashdot?
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. 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.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
This thread is one of the more memorable:6 315&threshol d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=126&mode=nested&pid=2850660
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2
Although this problem is an especially serious one when it comes to journalism, it's a general problem with the WWW. Sometimes one wants to link to a specific version of a webpage or examine the changes that have made. One solution is to use RCS to keep track of page versions, and use a web server extension (such as an apache module) that allows access to the changelog and to past versions. I would love to see this implemented widely...
I hacked up a little perl script demonstrating the idea. Now each of my web pages can have a "this page contains version information" link to its changelog.
And then there's VMS which has versioning built into the filesystem...
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The world changes and so does the news. If I read a story that is developing, I'd rather read a single cohesive document rather than an initial report followed by a truckload of corrections and additions. I read enough changelogs in my job, I really do not want to have to deal with it when I'm checking the market. Just give me the latest stuff. If I want an update, I can go back to my bookmark and get the update.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Yes that certainly is unacceptable. However, it was a discussion about slashdot itself, not a discussion on an article..
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Bit ironic to see on slashdot, where there are frequently (maybe twice a day) unmarked minor corrections to stories due to comments which point out problems (the URL doesn't work, the title has a typo, etc). Of course, more major updates do get marked as such, presumably so that readers will reread them.
First of all, there's no reason you can't fetch yourself a copy of a story in the morning, and then read it whenever you want, refer back to it on a later date, compare it with a later edition, etc. In fact, if anything prevented this, we wouldn't have this article. It's not like you can call up a newspaper and ask them to print you yesterday's paper. If you want to see yesterday's paper, you look at a copy produced by the company yesterday, achived by you or someone else. It's not the news people's job to write history; it's their job to write current events. As things change, it's not their job to tell you about the past.
Should they mark updates? Yes, but for the same reason that slashdot marks them: it is a disservice to people who read the original or people the original was unfavorable to if the new version is not marked as such, because people won't reread the article, and will not know about the new information.
I had this same argument with a friend who used to be the editor for our national broadcaster's online news service. He was very surprised that I considered it an issue, and thought that it was in fact an advantage of the web over traditional media, that you could seamlessly update and modify stories. He wasn't swayed by the 1984 comparison, or the point that he was deleting a valuable historical reference. But then he was working for an organisation that recorded over the Wanderly Wagon archive tapes rather than buy new ones.
It's funny the way we're ending up with a de facto, distributed Big Brother. Life eh.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
For people who's lives are not directly impacted by the stories that are reported, I don't see a problem with re-writes of stories. On the other hand, almost every story has a direct impact on someone.
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
You never know...
Moderating on Slashdot is not done by the operators of Slashdot.
/. FAQ:
From the
"The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them."
This
Excellent story, Roblimo. Really good story.
I will certainly trust CNN less.
The subhead of the CNN story is "MIT professor takes stand again after fumbling answers as states' attorney grilled him Wednesday." I will trust MIT less, also. Someone who is thinking of applying to MIT should perhaps re-consider their choice. How many other professors there would participate in an attempt to mislead the Court?
if you really want to see the inner workings the slashdot staff will not reveal to you, you must visit here. [slashdot.org]
Or read the FULLY OPEN source code.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
...and I get modded offtopic. Very funny. Next time I'll post my 'censorship in the media' posts under the Star Wars topic, or something more appropriate.
writethroughs and changing the story is that the writethoughs are _obvious_ and you get get old versions. Sometimes I work with AP write stories and if its been written through its in the titile so a story that start out as "HOUSE FIRE IN CT" changes to "HOUSE FIRE IN CT 2nd Writethough". Not only changes, but a new story shows up. So you can still get all the old verisons.
This cnn business sounds more like changing the story beacuse of editorial pressue.
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
for deep linking...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The infamous moderation investigation thread springs to mind. Perhaps you're unaware. A user set up multiple accounts, used some for trolling, some for posting pro linux crap, some for other stuff. He kept track of how fast he accumulated karma and what he accumulated it for. He posted a well written summary. There were hundreds of responses. The post was moderated hundreds of times (informative, insightful, offtopic, troll). Everyone who moderated it up permanently lost moderation access.
Check the SLASH source. There's a "bitchslap" program that moderates all of a users's posts down to -1. Jaime has admitted to having used it.
That's not true. Sometimes they post the Update. Sometimes they silently edit the article text. Sometimes they yank the article from the frontpage entirely. Browse at -1 sometime, and you'll probably see an early poster quoting the text and pointing out how inaccurate it is, but the text was silently changed.
Please mode up! haha.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Here's a Newspeak dictionary.
Newspeak may have been inspired by Basic English or Esperanto. Contrary to the opinion of some, Toki Pona was not inspired by Newspeak.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It would be cool if Google or other search engines could track this kind of thing. When linking to a page it could tell you how much of the textual content of the page had changed, and how recently. For things like the 'home page' of a news site this is useless, they change all the time anyway. So there would need to be some heuristic for detecting 'sneaky modifications' to a body of text.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Slashdot was guilty of some rather significant rewriting -- without their usual "Update:" -- of a story back in June 2001.
0 2
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/24/22462
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
If you think that's already bad, just wait 'till they start applying DMCA-like laws to news acticles. You can view the article, but cannot make a backup copy of it. Then the link changes. You notice the change, but you cannot even prove it changed because there's no way you can get the older article without violating the law. That's getting even closer to 1984...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I think there should be a toggle on a news story that emails you if the story changes. I know I often send the URL of stories to friends and my assumption is that the article at the URL will be the same as when I sent it.
This is particularly hard to deal with if there was a single point or phrase I wanted to convey that later was edited out.
At the very least, there should be a "View older versions" link so you can see the revisions made. Even if they had some disclaimer that there was newer information at another location (that was linked as well).
Balanced reporting, and they often scoop the Big Players too.
Fox has pretty good, balanced news, too.
Constitutionally Correct
Permanence in URL's: It's got to be the media's promise to everyone.
modern choral music...
The problem with that is that people don't read the corrections, or don't remember them, or confuse them with the uncorrected version. Once a mistake is fixed then it's counterproductive to keep the incorrect version around in and presented as news.
You can't go back and change yesterday's newspapers.
Yes, but you can update the articles throughout the day as later editions roll off the press. I used to work for an afternoon newspaper, covering court trials. You would have to write one version of the story, perhaps speculating on what was going to happen, for the early editions that went out to outlying counties, then file another story with the morning highlights of the trial for the editions delivered to homes within the city, then try to get something sensational splashed across the front page for the final edition that was sold on the downtown streets. The focus of the story could change throughout the day, and often another reporter would be sent in to make sure you didn't miss anything while the first reporter was outside the courtroom filing a report (no laptop usage was allowed inside the courtroom).
People have already pointed you to the FAQ, but I figured I would paste this link of one of the worst thread bitchslappings.
/. are offtopic, and many completely offtopic posts get rated 5's regularly. Why? Because we, as readers, find some offtopic posts interesting and informative. Whether an entire thread is offtopic or not is up to us. /.'s moderating goals should be to simply clear obvious abuses and hacking attempts, not to derail an entire thread out of spite.
/.
/. does isn't at least double-think (and not outright censorship), it is, at best, very misleading and disengenous.
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
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 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.
All about me
Look at the latest story.
Terrorists attack US with pipe bombs.
(changed)
US Pipe boomer at large.
(changed)
Father-in-law turns in pipe bomber.
Rewriting news to fit the current scope or concept of the news does an injustice to factual reporting. You need to follow a story from start to finish. If you jump to the end, you must accept someone else conclusion as facts.
*Update.
Bush wins presidency in Florida. Recount favored President elect Bush.
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The one who writes the history books wins...
This is nothing new, as the article itself points out. Newspapers and wire services have been doing the same thing for decades. New facts come in, stories change, mistakes are fixed. This has nothing to do with Orwell or other nebulous conspiracies.
;)
There's no obligation for a news source to keep around old versions of their articles/broadcasts/whatever in a publically accessible form. If something in the article is wrong or incomplete, then fix it, post the corrected version, and zap the old version.
Besides, why would someone want to deliberately link to a version of the story that's deemed incorrect by the news source presenting the story? It's hard enough to get people to pay attention to corrections and retractions--why, aside from historical curiosity, should we deliberately perpetuate a flawed story?
I'd be pretty annoyed if I got all worked up over a story only to find that I was being given bad information (not that that ever happens on Slashdot, of course
Deliberately disengaging a realtime discussion thread from the most recent developments on the topic under discussion seems like a bad idea to me.
Don't you mean 1984? I think you're a decade off..
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
This is the type of article that makes me want to subscribe.
[o]_O
If you read Yahoo wire reports, Reuters or AP, the stories still have version numbers on them.
r y&ncid=5 86&e=3&cid=586&u=/nm/20020509/wl_nm/mideast_dc_206 5
d =5 86&e=3&cid=586&u=/nm/20020509/wl_nm/mideast_dc_206 3
From the current "World News" Reuters feed (no, I'm not going to bother making this a link):
Israel mideast story:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto
Which superceded the previous version:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&nci
Notice the "2065" and "2063" at the end of the URL. Those are version numbers. Does make you wonder what happened to 2064, it comes up "not found" at yahoo.
But some services still do that.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
The difference is you can't access the original story. In news print, if the article is changed, you can still get the original print. On TV, if they start reporting something else, you can still get the first report. On the web, if they change the original, it's gone.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Gee, someone made a mistake in print, lets sue. I can see putting pressure on them to at least mark and foot note changes after it is first published but suing for an inaccuracy is, in my opinion, wasteful and smacks of money grubbing.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I'm looking at two stories, one on CNN's website, and one on the NY Times site. In each case, there is a headline, and some additional information on the next line (reporter's name for the Times, a timestamp for CNN) Would it be difficult, from a programming point of view, to adopt a structure like this: HEADLINE (reported by) (latest posting timestamp) (nnn updates since original publication) (original posting timestamp) where clicking the (nnn updates) generates a list of previous versions of the story (.001, .002 ... .nnn)
STORY GOES HERE...
Yes, information does change over time, especially as news is gathered and developed. News junkies like myself, and other interested parties, could use the (nnn updates) link to see how a story develops over time.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
I agree. Many times I've hit the submit button by mistake and can't go back and edit it. However, think about the logistics of that. It could cause a problem in that if you were allowed to change your posting to 1984 after I posted that..my posting would not make any sense in context. You would need to notify all the people below you regarding your change...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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).
But it's slow, and months behind. Their web crawler makes a pass about once every two months, and the latest content shown is still from late 2001.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There was an article called "Why does the Associated Press change it's articles?" in _You_Are_Being_Lied_To_ from Disinfo press. The manipulation of articles after release has been occuring since before the first online media stand opened it's doors.
A quote:
On July 5, 2000, AP released two versions of an article about the European Parliament voting to expand its probe into Echelon, the US-based communications-eavesdropping network that monitors phone calls, faxes, and email worldwide. At 5:33 PM, the headline read, "European Parliament Votes for Wider Probe Into US Spying." The hammer must've come down awfully fast, because when the second version of the article was put on the wire at 6:14 PM, the headline had been softened considerably: "Europe Votes for Wider Probe of Alleged U.S. Spy Network." Ah, so now the spying is merely "alleged." And, more subtly, it's not even US "spying" anymore-it's just a "spy network." They may or may not be actively spying, but the network is there. Allegedly.
In case you people haven't been paying attention, the readers of the newspapers and other media are not the customers. They are the product, and they are being sold to the advertisers. The advertisers themselves are the customers - they pay for the paper (what you pay doesn't cover the cost of the paper, much less provide any profit). And since the customer is always right, the press is happy to change it's articles for them, or even for the government.
The common rebuttal to this is some kind of petulant namby-pamby whining about freedom of the press. The people who decide what goes in the press are high, high up in the heirarchy. You don't rise to those positions unless you've proven yourself to be the kind of slick manipulator whose first priority is keeping the advertisers, and whose second priority is luring in readers. Printing the truth or having any level of integrity is twenty-second priority, just after priority twenty-one, keeping a steady supply of cocaine, priority twenty, getting rid of subordinates who might get you in trouble, and priority ninteen, having a good retirement package.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
If that is the level of intelligence to be expected at MIT, then be afraid of paying them good money to go there. Remember, where there are ignorant people there are likely to be more ignorant people.
It was not the fumbling that was an attempt to mislead the Court. It was the attempt to mislead the Court that was an attempt to mislead the Court.
I worked at Dow Newswires for 10 years, and was a member of the IPTC/NAA (International Press Telecommunication Council/National Newspaper Assoc. of America).
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.
Uh, because he is a stupid, fucking anti-semitic asshole that hates Western Culture and America with a passion because no one gives a shit about his narrow minded, hate based dialogue. If it were not for the US liberal colleges, the man wouldn't know how to earn a living or even feed himself. Chompsky is up there with the David Dukes and Louis Farahkans in our society. Nothing more than a hateful racist with a small following of whacked out, bigoted idiots.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
If updated comments had an easily visible line saying "UPDATED - [link to previous version, and timestamp of update]", then it would not be a big issue that it had changed. People could clearly see that the comment had been changed and that the change had been done after several of the replies had been posted, and if something didn't make sense they could go and have a look at the original version.
That is the core issue: Whether you tell your readers about updates or not. Whether you are updating stories in place or not is a cosmetic issue that doesn't really matter if you make it clear that updates have been made and either archive old versions or post a changelog.
Whenever I find an interesting story that I want to send to a friend, I always cut and paste the story into an email address rather than giving them the URL. Why? Because I've been stung one too many times by reading a version 1.0 of an article, telling my friends about it and my reaction to it, and then having them complain that my comments were off base. I double check the story and, whatta-ya-know, the story has been changed to version 1.1 so that my comments do seem pretty off base, NOW. So then I have to explain to my friend that the original story had a different tone and so on and so forth. And lord knows whether my friends believe me or think I'm making excuses.
I suppose that by doing a cut-and-paste of the article that I'm violating the copyright but I just don't trust online news sources to preserve an article between the time I read it and my friend gets around to seeing it.
The thing that pisses me off the most is when I catch a obvious error in an article and send an email to the website informing them of this. I figure it takes me a minute to do and will help hundreds or thousands of other people who will read the article after me. Usually the error gets corrected between the time that I send my message and someone reads my correction. So you can guess what happens next: I get a condescending response telling me that I am in error and that I should double check the article. That's usually about the time that I quit reading that website and look for another source of news...
GMD
watch this
If I read a story I don't want to see the inaccurate copy of yesterday, I want the up to date and full story.
But I don't want a significant news detail downplayed just because it happened in the morning. That seems to be what happened to this story: a highly significant hesitation on the part of a Microsoft witness was written through with the rest of the day's news.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So just that we all understand you, according to your logic, if you don't agree with Israel, if we criticize its politics or head of state, we are anti-semitic? And if you happen to be jewish and criticize Israel or Sharon (like Chomsky), you are a "self-hating jew" (even rabbis)? So no debate is possible, right? Boy, you're quite the reactionary! Putting David Duke, Farrakhan and Chomsky in the same boat...
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. 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!
Reminder: find a new sig
I remember somone joking about putting a link to the goggle cache in the stories on slashdot... Or at least I THOUGHT it was a joke, now it looks suspisciously like a Good Idea.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The worse assumption is that of the CNN people, that I'm going to come back and read the same story again. If I do I doubt I'll have any problem realizing it has changed. However unless there is some notice that the story has been updated or changed why on earth would I read it again if I think I already have?
The problem is that most people wont read it again and may then proceed based on earlier, possibly incorrect, information the gained from a prior version of the story.
Perhaps what is needed is a version control system where online viewers see the latest revision by default, and can click on previous published editions of the article as well, if they choose. Kind of like a "viewcvs" sort of setup for each article.
I don't know if the online newspapers and news sites would go for this (as there was probably a good reason they made the change, whatever it is), but IMHO it would help improve journalistic integrity.
Then you've got proof. Ctrl+S will set you free!
Of course, you'll just get accused of making up your own version of the story, but maybe in the future there will be a form of HTML or (more likely) XML that tracks version changes and uses checksums somehow to hinder deliberate tampering. But even so nothing will be tamper proof.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
And when she answered "no" in a post, Taco modded her to down -1.
No, posts only disappear completely when they hit -2. IIRC, the FAQ says something about it being a rare (ahem) bug when that happens. Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
As the founder and (from 1997-2000) editor of 7am.com, a "net-only" news service that has its content syndicated through a network of almost a quarter-million 3rd-party webpages, I adopted a different strategy to updating news stories.
Instead of rewriting an entire story as events unfolded I felt it was more "honest" to publish updates alongside the previous reports.
This produced stories which had the latest facts at the top and the initial report at the bottom -- with each update clearly delineated.
By using this method, readers were able to see for themselves whether we'd made mistakes and therefore judge the quality and timeliness of our reporting.
Clearly the meteoric growth of 7am.com vindicated (to at least some degree) this approach of "honest reporting."
Since I withdrew from all management and editorial involvement in 7am.com they appear to have changed their editorial policy to follow that of the other news publishers.
Heh. I never said I thought they were reliable. I just said they were a "major" news media. There's quite a nuance there.
Reminder: find a new sig
Roblimo is my favorite editor. He did a sweet job on one of my favorite pet peeves. Mod me down, but that man is a real jornalist IMHO.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
bend.com is notorious for this. Worse, the editor changes the articles and thus makes the already-posted comments irrelevant or complaints seem unfounded (or stupid.)
I've exchanged messages with the editor, and he won't budge. A lot of us have mentioned it, but no changes are going to take place, as far as I know.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
The actual use of the term recognizes the right of nations to conduct millitary operations, and the responsibility of nations for controlling terrorist organizations (read: non-government organizations which deliberatly target non-millitary structures to acheive their aims)
I find your definition of terrorism rather strange. So terrorism targets non-military structures? Do you consider civilians structures? That seems a bit dehumanizing, doesn't it?
Well, if we are going to have a serious debate, we should at least agree to this: technically, civilians targeting soldiers of an occupying force (what you would call military "structures") isn't considered terrorism. For example, members of the french resistance weren't terrorists, even though the nazis called them such. Clearly, civilians (such as members of a "non-government organizations") that deliberately target other civilians are terrorists. For example, suicide bombers, who commit atrocious acts against innocent targets. Those are Chomsky's words, by the way. Excerpts from this interview: Your interpretation of the definition doesn't leave much room for non-civilians, i.e. the military, who target civilians. But isn't that a form of terrorism? Forget the official US Army definition for a second (which says it is). Remember, you don't have to anihilate to terrorize. You don't have to kill a man to destroy him. The truth is, violence can take many forms, from outright assassination to the simple humiliation of checkpoints, from not adequately protecting civilians in military operations to using them to pick up potentially booby-trap objects, from enforcing curfews for months to random beatings, and so on. State violence against civilians for political goals is state terrorism. Perhaps it doesn't fit in your own definition of what terrorism is. That does not make it less destructive nor despicable.
Reminder: find a new sig