The Atlantic: The Trouble With Unpublishing the News.
This article reminds me of two things that are circling around my cranium, especially since running across ‘pro blog’ sites recommending bloggers rewrite their archives:
First. I think one of the most important projects anyone could set up, would be a website archive-watch; one that checks for changes in published articles after the publish date. You can’t ‘vanish’ an article in a printed publication, but you *can* on a newspaper’s website. Having a system that continuously monitors canary-in-a-coalmine articles for alterations could be useful.
Second. Others in the past declared weblogs are *not* journalism. Yet we regularly see bloggers who cover journalist beats seeking protection of ‘amateur weblogging’ one second, only in the next second declaring themselves deserving of ‘journalist’ protections. A physicist (for example) who weblogs can’t duck the fact s/he’s a physicist. Their pronouncements get held to a professional standard. Should journalists be able to duck responsibility and cry “weblogger!”? We readers merely ask for some consistent integrity.