Keith of Triadwatch says the (Greensboro, NC) News & Record's online article about lawyers telling elected officials not to accept a free trip on a developer's plane was scrubbed of a quote from the mayor without comment or note. The quote, says Keith*, was there, then it wasn't. A commenter in the comments to the story says the same thing.
Amanda Lehmert, the article's author, did not respond to a request for comment prior to me clicking the "publish" button.
[* On a phone call with me.]
we will see if Amanda wants to let us know the quote that was taken out.
ReplyDeleteHello guys. The quote Keith is talking about was one from the mayor saying that the whole debate hurt Roy Carroll's feelings because he had nothing to gain from this venture. This was on a first version of the story, which was written in the afternoon and posted online without any comment from the Community Foundation.
ReplyDeleteWhen I interviewed Lynn Wooten from the foundation Friday night, I incorporated her comments into the story. One of her comments was nearly the same sentiment the mayor made, so I took the mayor's quote out. I thought it would be overkill to make the same point twice. As far as I am concerned, the important thing was to say, as the story did, why the mayor thought this was OK. And that was still in there without that particular quote.
Remember that, in the desire to get stories posted online as quickly as possible, you are often watching the writer write and rewrite the story as more information comes in. So it's no uncommon to see things like this change!
-Amanda
So the first online edition of post had this to say "Mayor Yvonne Johnson said that this whole debate has hurt Roy Carroll's feelings". Thanks for this Amanda , I will play nice on this one, but if i was bill knight this ethical lapse of judgement from our local elected officials and how they don't understand why this was a problem to begin with will resonate with a lot of people in greensboro.
ReplyDeleteI am wondering under what circumstances, if any, would the News & Record deem it appropriate to note changes to a story.
ReplyDeleteI've also had people ask me about the difference between what first appears online and the print or final version of a story. Happened to me yesterday with my Greensboro College story.
ReplyDeleteI think if we changed something significant - took a comment out we didn't get almost identically from someone else or added or deleted something very important - we'd note it. But the premise under which we're operating as a daily print publication with an online site is that you get news as it breaks online - which means, as Amanda says, we're still writing, re-writing and gathering information.
It seems like it would be sort of a waste of time to mark the edit trails in real time. Anyone under the impression that what they see on the website the minute it goes up is a final version that will not change as we learn more and re-write is working from a false premise.
I'm unaware of any time that my own writing has undergone such radical changes from the online version to the print version that it would matter one way or the other and in the case of Amanda's story it seems not to matter at all -- she let someone else deliver essentially the same sentiment because she thought it better to have more voices in the story speaking to the questions and was going to have a finite amount of space.
That's print for you. But I also think it's the better writing decision, regardless of how much space you have. You'd be amazed how much stuff we get every day that we end up not using because it would be superfluous - our deciding not to use it -- or deciding not to use it once we get something better - isn't scrubbing our stories of content the public should have, it's just editing.
"It seems like it would be sort of a waste of time to mark the edit trails in real time." -- Joe
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Joe. We disagree on that. Bloggers manage to make notes of such changes with little effort. The N&R should do the same. Why?
- To defend your position as the "paper" of record. You are not if the record is constantly shifting and being deleted.
- To maintain credibility. You know you have high standards. Your readers want to be able to monitor that. Would you ever delete a comment because it was inconvenient to a boss's friend? Of course not, so convince us by letting us know when and why you delete/edit.
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ReplyDeleteI think this is just a print/online thing that needs to be ironed out.
ReplyDeleteNo newspaper anywhere (of which I'm aware) currently provides an edit trail on stories if they're partially posted before they're fully written.
Maybe there's an argument to be made that nothing should be posted until it's in its final form -- though I disagree with that. But I don't see a good argument for posting a series of different versions of a story online with an edit trail throughout.
Why? Because unless significant facts have changed (in your example from Amanda's text it couldn't be less significant which person made the same sentiment - it was just a writer's choice as more quotes were available).
I agree with you that SOME bloggers publish edit trails or edits. Which is a good thing if something significant has changed. But they are also (largely) not responsible for reporting what is often two full length stories a day in real-time, editing as they go, and then creating what their bosses will then consider the "final" version, also to be posted online, and in print in the morning.
I agree that journalists shouldn't delete significant information from a story without explaining why. But leaving every bit of everything you write as you make changes, edits, quote or word choices just seems like superfluous overkill to me as someone who actually has to do all the writing and reporting in one day, deliver a finished coherent product which is (for now) still almost entirely geared toward the print edition and also talk with readers about the story as it goes and when it's done.
It's really a matter of choosing how much time and effort you can spend on what throughout the day, what is most useful.