This particular column is near and dear to my heart for many reasons, but primarily because I believe in correcting false and misleading information after it’s reported. In the age of online media, there really are very few reasons why you shouldn’t edit and improve your online content.
The half-life of an online story is much longer than what you might believe, one small test that was run during my time at KOMU indicated that that half-life of a front-page story (which gradually gets pushed back of course) was 48 hours, so after two days, only half of the total traffic has seen the story.
This gives the media a tremendous amount of time to go back, read over the content, add additional information and content, and make the story much better for half of the people who are ever going to see it.
One way that KOMU maximizes and takes advantage of that statistic is by having the overnight crew do just that, go back through stories, copy-edit them again, add links to other relevant information and previous stories, create new graphics, and in general make the stories better.
The Poynter column I referenced at the top has to do with the New York Times having a Google breakthrough, their archives are now searchable through Gooogle and rank for many keywords, this brings the NYT a lot more free traffic. However it also increases the chances that false and misleading information can be found and do harm.
If I remember back to some of my very first journalism classes at MU I recall that minimizing harm was a goal of journalists everywhere! Certainly providing factual information in a non-misleading way has to relate to that minimization of harm.
The New York Times and other media organizations should allow responses and comments to their archive stories, it’s not re-writing history, it’s getting history right. In another feature in this series I’m going to talk about a Google initiative to provide just that, as well as how you can maximize the return on such archive searching and ranking.
Come back tomorrow for more of my featured responses to recent Poynter Institute articles and columns!
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