How Transparent Do You Like Your News?

One of the signal differences between print and digital journalism is the way the latter allows for instantaneous, continuous revision of a story. This creates a new area of debate for media ethicists: To what degree must a responsible journalist let readers know how an article has changed since it was first published? And who is being served by such efforts at transparency?

The Observer considers this question today, examining The New York Times's handling of Caroline Kennedy's short-lived bid to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate. The Times initially published a story to its website suggesting that Kennedy's candidacy had been derailed by embarrassing revelations over unpaid taxes and an illegal housekeeper, only to downplay those claims in the final version.

If you were curious to watch how the story changed throughout the day -- say, the way you would if you were to look on Nexis in the old days and see how one story changed from Sept. 6 to Sept. 7 -- you wouldn't be able to. And The Times doesn't feel it's necessary to offer its readers that chance, either.

Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt has cited the article as an apparent example of how the immediacy and incrementalism of online journalism is "undermining the values of the print culture." But Craig Whitney, the paper's standards editor, and Jon Landman, its digital editor, defend the decision not to let readers know each time a story mutates. "The pages are enormously confusing as it is," Landman tells the Observer. "Everything, as I've said to Clark, is a balance. You can have one imperative that conflicts with any number of others and you have to make some choices."

I've been thinking about this issue this week after publishing an item recently that required a rather categorical correction. Feeling a correction insufficient, one of the subjects of the item asked me to delete it from the site altogether. I declined. Even though I'd be only too happy to see that particular item disappear from memory, to me it would feel dishonest, as though I were hiding the evidence of my mistake. In the rare event that a story is so catastrophically egregious that it deserves to be purged from the web (as the Los Angeles Times did with its investigation of Tupac Shakur's murder), the purging should itself be noted loudly.

But is that being too precious? After all, I don't necessarily tell readers every time I make a change to a story, especially if it's just to correct a typo. Probably the most straightforward and transparent way to mark where text has been changed is the strikethrough, but I don't use that much, for reasons that are entirely stylistic.

At the risk of excessive navel-gazing, I'm curious to hear both from other journalists and from readers: Where should we draw the line? Is it ever okay to correct errors without pointing out the corrections? And, if so, what are the deciding criteria?