sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

The very first paper I wrote in graduate school was really just a writing test. It was assigned in the required introductory course for the CCT program, and was really just a hook for the faculty to identify which students might need to be referred to campus writing resources. Anyway, the assignment was just to discuss, in one page, a potential problem in contemporary media systems.

My paper, cleverly titled "Correction: Iterative Publishing DOES Have Negative Effects for Readers," was actually the best piece I wrote during my first semester. Rereading it nearly six months later, it was a very tight, well argued paper. To summarize, I discussed an important issue of journalistic quality on Internet news sites. I focused on a particular story on ESPN.com, but the trend can be seen on CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and others.

Here's the problem: On online sites, the demand for real-time news has caused publishers to sacrifice quality for speed. Articles are often made public before they have even been completely edited, and the article at a particular URL is likely to change several times, particularly over the first few hours. More importantly, factual errors are no longer publicly corrected... they are simply fixed on the fly. So a reader might read an article containing a factual error, but never learn of the error because, most likely, the reader won't return to the same article.

Looking back, again, I think the argument in the paper is quite strong. Were I to revise it, and had I the page-space to add to it, I would probably also speculate as to how this iterative publishing process erodes accountability and defers blame... errors are far less likely to result in disciplinary action, and more likely to simply be fixed and forgotten. This has a somewhat creepy 1984 quality to it, as well, as the lack of hard copies of papers means that past articles can be revised long after the fact (depending on how well third parties--like Google or Archive--actually track and archive changes to major news sites).