I just read a editor’s concern, on a journalism email list, that I had never thought of before. That newspapers, “generally prohibit anything except links back to their own sites.” because they fear the written content would be altered. A valid concern in the digital age were everything is changeable and it’s not always clear who you can trust. Is there a lot of worry among newspapers that a change in content out on the web could be taken for “truth” from a newspaper and cause a libel landslide?
This was the original question,
A local candidate for City Council want to post some of our articles about the campaign on his Web site. The articles in question are not posted on our Web site, so we would need to send him the text or he would need to just copy it out of the paper. I don’t really see a problem with it as long as you would do the same for anyone who asked. Any thoughts on this?
This was the response,
[snipit] “[C]an you be sure the stories can’t be altered? That’s why papers with Web sites generally prohibit anything except links back to their own site.”
Newspapers faced this in their own pages in the 30s when there sometimes new editions of the paper every hour, so that newsboys could hawk the latest fact or spin on a story. The papers would replate the front page, and maybe the back page where the jump was.
This brought about the question for librarians, which version of that day’s paper was the “official” one–the “newspaper of record” (apologies to the former gray lady)–and how many lies masqueraded as truth in the intervening editions between the first one and the last.