Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Save the complete citation

If you are doing research, here's an important reason to cite the date AND time along with the URL if you're going to use an online source.

On NYTimes.com, Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Traditionally in newspapers, it was the person holding the title of “news editor” who controlled the final content of print pages, often exercising power late at night, long after the top editors had gone home. Now, at The Times, news editors ride herd all day and deep into the night — steering content to digital platforms and, yes, the daily paper…

Unlike print, digital news is often updated throughout the day and night, sometimes many times. Versions evolve and sometimes morph into something quite different. Mistakes happen and are fixed…

For example, in the days after news broke that Arnold Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with his family’s housekeeper before becoming California’s governor, The Times ran an article about her, describing her neighborhood in Bakersfield. Some readers complained that this invaded her privacy.

You won’t find that article anywhere on NYTimes.com now, though, because later the same day a completely different story, written with a different focus by a different reporter, replaced it online and eventually appeared in the paper…

It’s problematic when content just disappears. It can also be problematic in a different way when content changes more subtly…

Finally, in addition to changes that vaporize information and leave people wondering, there are occasions when corrections are likewise vaporized and therefore go unacknowledged in the often-ephemeral digital domain.

Philip B. Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, told me that The Times published a correction online after an article on Jan. 8 erroneously reported that Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona had been killed in the Tucson shooting. I hadn’t realized a correction was ever published, and I can’t go online to verify it now because the correction is no longer there.

The reason, as Mr. Corbett explained, is that the story itself, crafted in New York early in the coverage, was replaced later by a new article written by a Times reporter in Tucson…