When should or shouldn’t you alter the record? Should you take back the news? After the West­min­ster Media Forum (2, 3, 4) here’s a US take from the news front­line with Mike Orren, of Dallas-Fort Worth web­site Pegasus News:

[T]oday I got an email from local man who wanted us to remove a story from our site. Our story said that he was charged with a ser­i­ous crime. He was later acquitted.

We don’t remove stor­ies, but we approach this sort of situ­ation dif­fer­ently than most media out­lets. Whether or not we do a new story on the acquit­tal, we update the old story with a notice and/or a link.

When mak­ing the change, I did a quick sur­vey of the cov­er­age from other media out­lets around town. Four had car­ried the ori­ginal story on the arrest. Two had run stor­ies on the acquit­tal. None had updated or linked the ori­ginal story to the new one.

Although search algorithms aren’t pub­lic domain, we do know that num­ber of items of a type and volume of traffic and links impact res­ults. And even without stat­ist­ics to back this up, I think it’s anec­dot­ally safe to assume that sen­sa­tion­al­istic “guy thrown in jail” stor­ies get more traffic mojo than paragraph-long “guy acquit­ted” stor­ies wedged into a regional roundup.

So, when you Google this fellow’s name, what comes up are the “guy thrown in jail” stories.

I’m temp­ted to say that news organ­iz­a­tions have the respons­ib­il­ity to update these stor­ies in both dir­ec­tions — ensur­ing that the updated ver­sion is avail­able to any­one who finds the ori­ginal. I’m not just talk­ing about the acquit­ted, but any story where we thought X but then learned that the truth is Y.

But then I real­ize that we’re often only able to do so fairly eas­ily because our con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem is so damn database-y. Plus, while our tech­no­logy enables this, we often lack the man­power to fol­low up on every story we run.

We didn’t catch this one until the acquit­ted accused con­tac­ted us a month later. I sus­pect that the two out­lets who haven’t repor­ted the acquit­tal aren’t so easy to reach or quick to update, par­tic­u­larly if the acquit­tal doesn’t make their news­cast. And given the busi­ness chal­lenges that are lead­ing to media lay­offs, fol­lowup may only get more difficult.

For sure, we’re in an age where the rules are being re-written every day. Tech­no­logy is allow­ing us do things that seemed a pipedream three years ago. Along the way, we need to reflect on the down­sides of the upside.

[HT: Terry Heaton]