DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE? Blogger Dan Hartung sent me an e-mail steering me to a very interesting discussion over at MetaFilter. It seems the online "New York Times" swapped out a bin Laden story published on Sept. 9 with a somewhat different story published on Sept. 12, but kept the URL the same. A pro-Democrat site smelled a conspiracy, which, if you read both articles, is a ridiculous charge. But the MetaFilter discussion raised some issues that I don't think have been fully addressed by online newspapers, which, after all, will form a huge part of the historical record.

I really don't think the government leaned on the NYT to redo the story. I don't see why they would; both stories seem fairly similar to me, only with the immediacy of the WTC attacks emphasized in the 9-12 version. This "switcheroo" is analogous to dead-tree newspapers updating and swapping out stories between editions when new information arrives or when mistakes are pointed out. That doesn't seem to raise too much of an Orwellian stink, and papers, especially the sports pages, do it every single day, generally without saying "Hey readers, this differs somewhat from the historical record that appeared in the edition with the 10 p.m. deadline." The problem, though, is URLs, which don't disappear as easily as your daily fishwrap. I think newspapers should do more to let readers know that an online story was updated. I notice a lot of newspaper sites have a "last updated at 10:33 p.m. 02-16-02" tag in stories. More of that would be helpful. Perhaps creating completely different links would be the answer; perhaps it would add to the confusion. I really can't say. (My daily job is exclusively on the dead-tree side of things. Generally, our dot-com operation picks up the stories that we've edited and slaps them online as is.) It's clear that dodgy newspaper URLs could definitely give bloggers fits, if Blogger isn't giving them enough already.