The Columbia Journalism Review talks about a new situation the increased use of online journalism brings- 'unpublishing.' An editor at a USC digital news website ran into the dilemma after publishing a story about a woman who was laid off her job because her visa was too expensive for her employer. Fast forward a few years and the same woman is asking the editor to remove the story. She is trying to find another job in the United States but since the article is online, her issues with her visa keep coming up and hurting her chances of employment. Online journalism brings a new aspect to media in that stories from years and years ago can be pulled up in seconds. In this situation, what should the editor do? Is there a time period that an article should be removed after? Are there situations where it is acceptable to 'unpublish' an article at the request of the subject?
http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/unpublishing_requests_are_on_t.php?page=all
I think that it's really unfortunate that a woman's life is being negatively affected by something a media outlet published. However, I really do believe that once something is published online it ought to never be unpublished or removed. What I think this media outlet should do is add an update to the story and clarify the woman's new visa status.
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting situation, however; I definitely agree with Andy. Once an article is posted, it can't be removed. It's the exact same with a newspaper, once it hits the presses, it can't be undone. Online journalism needs to treat itself the same way. I feel bad that this lady is having trouble finding a job, but maybe she shouldn't have agreed to make her story public in the first place. What many sites do do is archive their older stories and charge to see them, this way older stories aren't available without subscription. This would probably help this lady as her story wouldn't be as easily searchable. This is an interesting issue and I wonder if we'll see other examples of this in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think it is a bit ironic that online journalists even think they have a choice about removing something from the Internet. I think everyone has heard that once something has been uploaded, it is up forever. From search engine crawlers to caches to aggregating blogs to projects like the Internet Archive (http://archive.org/web/web.php), articles can never truly be removed. Yes, they can become less prominent, but I'm confident that an update to the original story is the best solution because it provides the strongest chance that the searcher will get the whole story.
ReplyDeleteMechanisms of the Internet aside, however, there is no room in journalism for a precedent of removing stories based on the regrets of sources - it's too messy and confusing to the reader base as a whole. Some of the examples in that article focus on people who have been victimized by a changing journalistic landscape, where stories have become much more easily retrievable. If this is the main underlying cause, then new generations should be familiar with the permanence of the Internet and judge their willingness to become a source appropriately.