Journalism as Living Document

As the New York Times and other brands put more of their archived content online, it seems that it is causing trouble for some:

“But if the Times is using search-engine-optimization techniques to push articles toward the top of search-engine results, does it have any ethical obligation to ensure that old errors, distortions, or omissions in its reporting don’t blight people’s current reputations? Times editors are discussing the problem, writes Hoyt, and in some cases the paper has added corrections to old stories when proof of an error has been supplied.”

 “So if we are programming the Web to remember, should we also be programming it to forget – not by expunging information, but by encouraging certain information to drift, so to speak, to the back of the Web’s mind?”

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