Handling “unpublishing” requests

Poynter has an inter­est­ing arti­cle today about how news­pa­pers han­dle “unpub­lish­ing” requests.

Kathy English, the pub­lic edi­tor of the Toronto Star, sur­veyed 110 news orga­ni­za­tions to find out how they deal with such requests. A major­ity of news orga­ni­za­tions, 78.2 per­cent, said they would remove con­tent given a good enough reason.

Almost all the papers, though, said unpub­lish­ing was a last resort. Publishing cor­rec­tions, adden­dums, follow-up sto­ries or even redact­ing some con­tent were go-to alter­na­tives to unpublishing.

Unpublish requests are a nat­ural evo­lu­tion of online news, where they are actu­ally pos­si­ble. If we were still pub­lish­ing all our news on dead trees, this would not be an issue.

I’m a hard-liner when it comes to these requests. Just because news web­sites have the abil­ity to unpub­lish mate­r­ial, it doesn’t mean that we should.

I hold most firmly to this posi­tion in the case when a source, after the story has run, asks that his or her name be removed from the arti­cle or for the whole arti­cle to be deleted. I’m sorry, but adults who talk to reporters have cho­sen to do so. They should be held respon­si­ble for what they say when they know they are talk­ing to the press.

I’m more lenient when it comes to sit­u­a­tions where leav­ing infor­ma­tion online could cause some­one harm. In most of those cases, pro­vided that the poten­tial harm could be proven, I’d sup­port redact­ing con­tent. Removing, though... I can’t quite bring myself to that.

My rules relax most when it comes to com­ments. I had a call this week from a local lawyer who wanted a com­ment about him removed from our web­site because it called him slimy. He came in with a bad atti­tude, and I passed the buck up to the man­ag­ing edi­tor to make the call — know­ing full well that the ME would OK the deletion.

The thing was this: If the caller had come in with a bet­ter atti­tude, I prob­a­bly would have removed the com­ment right away, even while he was on the phone. Since he came in mad at the news­pa­per and who­ever was on the other end of the phone, his sat­is­fac­tion was delayed.

The ME has put it this way in the past, and I’m inclined to agree: It’s not as if most com­ments on the board con­tribute a heck of a lot to civ­i­lized dis­course. Deleting one of them should not be a hair-pulling decision.

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Montreal Gazette to go Web-only on Sundays

An inter­est­ing piece of news for you who hap­pen to read the news­pa­per in Montreal. On Aug. 8, the Montreal Gazette will stop pub­lish­ing its Sunday edi­tion and go Web-only for a day, pub­lisher Alan Allnutt said in a state­ment on the paper’s web­site.

Montreal Gazette logoAllnutt said the paper has, for years, strug­gled to find enough adver­tis­ing to pay the bills. Dropping to a six-day sched­ule will save the paper quite a bit of money.

The Saturday paper will, for all intents and pur­poses, become the Sunday paper, the “Weekend Gazette.”

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In which a choice is made

In which a choice is made

This is, per­haps, the best illus­tra­tion I have seen so far of what Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is about — at least the best illus­tra­tion in comic strip form.

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Cognitive Surplus and The Shallows

I am cur­rently read­ing Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. I’m about a third of the way through it, and I hope to post a few thoughts here when I have time to set them in electrons.

Book CoversI also bought The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which I will read imme­di­ately after Shirky’s book. I imag­ine that I will be some­what more angry after read­ing Carr, but that’s gen­er­ally how I feel after read­ing some­thing he’s writ­ten about the Internet. I expect it from him.

You can credit Nieman Journalism Lab with get­ting me to buy Carr’s book. On the lab blog, Matthew Battles is writ­ing ongo­ing reviews of both books as he reads them (in five parts, as of this writ­ing — 1 2 3 4 5) Battles has inspired me to do my own “reviews” — or at least thought­ful write-ups. I hope this will get me back into an aca­d­e­mic frame of mind; since leav­ing grad school, that sort of deep ana­lytic read­ing and writ­ing has fallen by the wayside.

I should also men­tion that I bought both of these books not on paper but in iBooks. This will be my first seri­ous expe­ri­ence in read­ing a book entirely in an elec­tronic for­mat. I’ll share some thoughts on that as I go along too. So far, so good.

(The above image is bor­rowed respect­fully from the Nieman Journalism Lab.)

 

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iPad mania continues

I posted here a while back about receiv­ing my new iPad, but then I waited almost three-quarters of a month before post­ing again. I’m sure you were all left in breath­less antic­i­pa­tion, wait­ing for my opin­ion of the device.

I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, I thought I’d explain the long absence. Long ago in this blog­ging game, I learned that unex­pected and unin­tended hia­tuses hap­pen. It’s the nature of blog­ging, espe­cially when you’re not paid to write for the blog. Actually, I take that back. If I was a guest poster on some­one else’s blog, I’d feel more oblig­ated to make reg­u­lar post­ings, but since this is my own blog, I let it slide from time to time.

As I said, the inevitabil­ity of hia­tuses is some­thing I learned about long ago. I also learned that’s it’s almost point­less to apol­o­gize for them. It’s my blog, after all.

Still, I thought this hia­tus might be worth explain­ing. You see, I started a blog for my job. I’m a reg­u­lar blog­ger for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle now. You can find what I’m doing over at Becker’s Online Journal.

I try to stick to the topic of dig­i­talia and all things tech related on that new blog, but I built into the descrip­tion a lit­tle lee­way to allow myself to post the odd and quirky things that befit my online nature.

So please, take some time to read over at that site too.

On with the iPad already

In a word, the iPad is awe­some, but you already knew that from count­less other reviews out there. It’s almost uni­ver­sally loved, and the story is no dif­fer­ent at my house, where we have not one, but two of the devices. (There was sim­ply no way I could buy just one. One spouse would have become mur­der­ously jeal­ous of the other.)

Why do I love the iPad? It has a screen-tilt-rotation lock switch. No kid­ding. My biggest and loud­est pet peeve about the iPod Touch was the inabil­ity to read most Web pages and use most apps while lay­ing on my side in bed. Now, I can recline any way I want and lock the iPad’s screen in the desired orientation.

OK, there are some work-related ben­e­fits too. The abil­ity to use Dropbox, Evernote and all those other Web ser­vices on the device is extra­or­di­nar­ily use­ful and saves me from hav­ing to lug my MacBook Pro around to do most every­day com­put­ing tasks. One down­side to the device is that it’s a bit heavy and awk­ward to hold, so I’m always afraid I’m going to drop it when I’m hold­ing it up in a chair or in bed.

The apps, oh, my, god, the apps. I have spent more money on apps since buy­ing the thing than I prob­a­bly did in all the years I owned my iPod Touches com­bined. Still, it’s a small price to pay for the con­ve­nience of mobile computing.

Of spe­cial note, GoodReader. I’ll let you read about the app your­self to see why.

Upsides:

  • Tremendous bat­tery life
  • Big ol’ screen
  • Good enough suite of apps to get most work done
  • Gets peo­ple talk­ing to you in restaurants
  • Has a built in micro­phone! (Hello Google voice search! Hello record­ing inter­views with­out lug­ging a sep­a­rate voice recorder.)

Downsides:

  • It’s hard for me to type on. I wouldn’t want to write more than an e-mail or a few notes.
  • A bit awk­ward to hold when read­ing while lying down.
  • It’s hard to see cur­sor place­ment when you’re mov­ing the thing around. My fin­ger is always in the way.
  • No Flash.
  • No cam­era.

If you’ve got an iPad at home and dis­agree with me, do so in the com­ments. If you’ve got ques­tions, put ‘em in the com­ments. I may even respond to you using the WordPress app on iPad. You never know with me.

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