News sites as bad wikis

The Columbia Journalism Review complains about some slightly fishy brushing-of-mistakes-under-the-carpet at the New York Times. The paper published a piece talking about how many news sources panicked about the nuclear facility at Japan being abandoned – but significantly failing to mention its own panicky story on the topic (it did, however, include a correction to its original story). I’ve been dissatisfied the NYT’s coverage of the Japan story – as of many other rapidly developing stories in the last couple of years – the newspaper seems to have moved to a system that combines many of the disadvantages of e.g. your average Wikipedia entry, with none of the transparency.

As news coverage has moved onto the WWW, the NYT has apparently abandoned the idea that there is a ‘final’ version of a fast moving story. Instead, it starts with a story that perhaps has some skeletal facts, and updates it during the day. The problem is twofold. First – that it frequently leads to just the same kind of semi-coherent writing as the average Wikipedia entry. The original story and its framing never quite disappears, but is palimpsested (noun-turned-into-verb in honor of Lee’s memory) over by waves of later information, so that different bits and pieces of the piece seem to belong to different stories; a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of stitched-together sequences. Second – that it is impossible to reconstruct which changes were made when. Wikipedia – like all proper wiki implementations – has an edit history page, which allows you to see which changes were made when, and by whom. The New York Times has no such thing. This is especially annoying when information or quotes disappear from the original piece – one has no way of knowing when this happened, or of reconstructing them once they have disappeared.

This seems to me to be the product of an old set of norms (that the authority of a given story descends from its presentation as a definitive account of what happened) colliding with a very different set of online publishing demands (if the paper sticks with the ‘definitive’ account that one wrote eighteen hours ago, it will lose readers to websites that are less dainty in their updating practices). The unfortunate consequence though, is that we get newspaper articles that are not definitive, that do not really try to be definitive, but that more or less systematically occlude the ways in which they change. Hence, more messy writing, without the compensation of being able to figure out how the messiness arose (and what more coherent accounts lie behind it). It would be much preferable to have some equivalent of ‘view edit history’ for pieces by the New York Times and other such newspapers. I can’t imagine that it will happen anytime soon though.

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