BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

History

18 comments on History

History
: I’ve heard many worries and complaints about the web and weblogs but this guy needs to get some Prozac and relax. In a ZD story on ABC News (touted atop GoogleNews), some guy notes that MTV changed its online press release about Janet Jackson after her show and so he frets that we can “change history.”

The tools used to populate the Web with content afford us the ability to remake history on the fly. Whatever is posted is as ephemeral as the air around us. It can blow in and out and away with little notice. News stories published in traditional print media become public record unless someone can manage to, say, burn every copy of today’s New York Times.

But a homepage and a headline online can change from moment to moment, and a mistake can be erased long before many people notice. For content producers, this is a good thing, but not for the public. It provides an easy out for the media and lets companies that produce information and entertainment online become shifty….

MTV is not the first to do something like this. Anyone running a Web site can change the facts quickly. Bloggers, for example, can edit anything they’ve ever written. That may be fine for Joe Schmo writing about his goldfish in Poughkeepsie, but as blogs have become more mainstream and major media outlets begin to provide them as tools for news reporters and columnists, the ability to go back and change what’s been said about important events seems much more dangerous….

I predict that we will, in the next two years, see a major libel case involving a blog, and that there will be subpoenas of server and desktop caches and any printouts that were made of the blog on the day it may have libeled the complainant.

Make it two Prozac.

Relax, fella. The web only replicates life, where conversations and sights come and go and people change their minds. That’s the natural state of things. Printing everything for posterity is and always has been the privilege of a few.

18 responses to “History”

  1. Bryan C Avatar
    Bryan C

    The man could definitely benefit from some meds, or maybe a vacation. Stealth edits and buried news stories hardly originated with the Internet, and if anything blogs have turned more eyes toward spotting and documenting when someone tries to get away with it.
    I will admit I’m uncomfortable with bloggers who substantially change posts after the fact without any correction, update, or comment. Blogs that do that very often quickly lose my trust.

  2. tim Avatar
    tim

    Jeff,
    Respectfully, I have to disagree.
    The whole notion of “publishing” implies at least some form of pemanence. But when a headline, a photo or a story can be edited at will, with no breadcrumb-trail of exactly what the changes are, the medium does open itself to abuse and it’s certainly an issue worth discussing.
    For example, if a libelous article is deleted, there’s good and bad. The libel will no longer continue (at least in the obvious area: see Google Cache below), but at the same time, the injured party may no longer have access to any real evidence of the libel in order to secure damages.
    The other big wrinkle in this, of course, is Google, which manages to cache copies of many, many web pages, long after they’re edited or gone. In most cases, a page deleted from a popular web site is never truly gone. For a recent example, look no further than the example this guy cites: the deleted MTV press release, conveniently cached by Google and still available for all to read, despite the best efforts of the MTV webmonkeys.

  3. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Who says this is publishing?

  4. Richard Kersey Avatar
    Richard Kersey

    I’m going to have to disagree also. This is an issue that I’ve been tackling in my mind since starting my weblog. You see I feel it would be wrong of me to go back and change some wording in my posts. However, I definitely see how easy it would be to edit, delete, or even add posts to say you supported a certain opinion after it become popular or vice versa.

  5. Robert S. Avatar
    Robert S.

    The guy (Lance Ulanoff) shoulda checked Google’s cache for that missing MTV page. Those cached pages on Google have already caught plenty of folks with their pants down. All people have to do is go view it there and then reprint what they find . . . everywhere.
    Of course, the content does have to be up long enough for Google to cache it in the first place.
    But I agree, Ulanoff’s fears are a little exaggerated.

  6. tim Avatar
    tim


    Who says this is publishing?
    Whaaaaaa?
    /Jon Stewart
    What is the distribution of news and opinion other than publishing? We can split hairs and say it’s not *really* publishing until a printing press or broadcast tower is involved, but I’m surprised that you, of all people, would raise that question.
    Isn’t the news that Zeyad is posting to his blog in Iraq publishing?
    Yesterday you pointed to Adrian Holovaty’s take on the distributed reporting on Fark around the Janet Jackson story. Isn’t that publishing?
    When the majority leader of the Senate has to leave with his head hanging low because of the constant reporting and opinionating in the blogspace, isn’t that publishing?
    Am I missing some nuance of what you’re getting at?

  7. Dave Schuler Avatar
    Dave Schuler

    Dear Mr. Jarvis:
    The Internet in general and blogs in particular offer many challenges for our culture but I don’t think this is one of them. And I agree with you that these challenges are more reflections of our culture than anything else. To my mind the most significant challenge is the growing influence of the new tribalism: groupthink. When you can get select all of your information from a very narrow and divergent group of sources you get The Blind Men and the Elephant. It’s the fix we are all in: the territory is not the map. But as they say with the help of computer in seconds you can make a mistake that would have taken you years to make manually.

  8. old maltese Avatar
    old maltese

    Bryan got it right. Stealth editing gets found out, and blogs live (or die) by their reputations, just as a newspaper, magazine, broadsheet, …….

  9. Ebb Tide Avatar
    Ebb Tide

    I happen to appreciate it when blogs point out where they have updated or corrected their info, a political blog at CJR always puts a note at the bottom of an entry mentioning this type of thing, a correction or updated info, whereas mere “persons” with blogs don’t always do this…. and maybe that is where the line is drawn… a personal blog vs. a more professional one.

  10. Ebb Tide Avatar
    Ebb Tide

    http://www.cjr.org/blog/
    ^^^ This is the blog I mentioned above, their updates or corrections are noted at the bottom of the entry, as needed.

  11. FightingQuaker Avatar
    FightingQuaker

    This guy has never heard of Google’s cache.

  12. OTB Avatar
    OTB

    “Who says this is publishing?” -Jeff Jarvis, 02.05.04
    “This is Gutenberg, baby!” -Jeff Jarvis, 01.30.04
    What a perfect example of blogger hypocrisy. “We’re great, we’re revolutionizing and democratizing media, we’re calling big media out on their lies and distortions…but don’t expect US to be held to the same standards…”
    Kee-rist.
    btw, Salon has yanked Farah’s byline from his anonyblogging article. Oh, the irony. Heh.

  13. Eric Deamer Avatar
    Eric Deamer

    OTB:
    You beat me to it.
    I truly am gobsmacked by this new “who said this was publishing?” wrinkle. Isn’t that the whole big idea here, that it is a new kind of publishing, low to no cost, instantaneous publishing to the whole world, “push-button publishing for the people” if you will. Or a new publishing revolution akin to the invention of “movable type”. (Hey, I should do something with that). There’s a button on my typepad software that says “publish”. Are they using the term improperly? Can I no longer tell my mom that I’m a “published writer”?
    Anyway, I think this little piece does bring up some serious points. With the ease of this new kind of publishing, stories can be disappeared and altered much more easily than with dead-tree publishing, and with a much less substantial record of what “really” happened. I realize there is google cache, but that’s not widely known outside of the somewhat web-geeky community, and, as someone pointed out, the original has to be there for a certain length of time to be google-cached in the first place.
    And if you are correcting, should you just send a new, corrected version of the story out into cyberspace? Or should you do the proper blog-like thing of nothing changes in updates at the same link, which is how Slate handles corrections? This is an interesting question. I think this guy brings up a serious point. I don’t see him damning weblogs anywhere, he’s just making an observation.
    A good counterargument is that weblogs actually are more likely to highlight differences between the original and the altered version because there’s always some blogger-geek out there who notices this stuff and grabs the original.
    I also think that he is dead right about the libel cases involving blogs. We all know about many instances in which this has come very close to happening. It’s obviously only a matter of time.
    You’re right that “Printing everything for posterity is and always has been the privilege of a few”. I thought that that was the whole point, i.e. that this medium was supposed to be democratizing because we’re taking everything on-line and away from print, allowing everyone to have the benefits of printing everything for posterity without the costs.
    As a final note, I’d like to say that I happen to love the Joe in Poughkeepskie talking about his goldfish site.

  14. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Red herring, guys. Gutenberg means revolution, not necessarily publishing. And when I asked who said it’s publishing what I’m saying is who says it follows the rules of old publishing? It’s new. New medium. New age. New rules, not yet set. I say this guy is operating off old rules dictated primarily by the difficulty of erasing ink from paper.

  15. OTB Avatar
    OTB

    >Red herring, guys.
    Uh…you’re the one who said it, Jeff.
    This whole “show your papers at the door” attitude towards online anonymity is the _real_ red herring, Jeff–trying to distract attention away from the the fact that most big-name bloggers like yourself want it both ways: to snicker and sneer and pass judgement on the ‘old media’, while exempting yourselves from the same standards.
    Also, for the record, I post anonymously b/c I’ve had one serious cyberstalker situation already; it took two years of my life and an enormous amount of grief to get through it all. Discrete posting may annoy some, but it’s still less dishonest than someone refusing to admit when they’re wrong.

  16. Benny Avatar
    Benny

    Gutenberg means revolution, not necessarily publishing. And when I asked who said it’s publishing what I’m saying is who says it follows the rules of old publishing?
    Er, yeah, make it up as you go along. LOL!

  17. Bryan C Avatar
    Bryan C

    Seems some of you guys are equating “publishing” with some species of journalism. Where formal correction and editing policies are concerned I’d argue that newspapers and other publications of record have always been the exception, not the rule. Gutenburg, after all, enabled anonymous pamphleteers, novels, and tabloids right alongside the Bibles and newspapers.
    Sure, some traditional journalistic practices should apply to blogs that aspire to be taken seriously as journalism. The question is how exactly they’re applied, and by whom.
    Despite the alleged dangers of slippery web pages, many blogs seem to do a better job of self-correcting than any newspaper. Getting the BBC to admit they got their facts very wrong took months of unrelenting pressure and a full governmental inquiry and they’re still trying to weasel out of it. Getting a good blogger to admit and fix a mistake takes a handful of well-researched emails from readers. The first doesn’t want to talk to you and the second one does. I’ll take the latter, please.

  18. Daily Reader Avatar
    Daily Reader

    Edited posts matter little on diaries, and matter a lot on news blogs. So for each blog (including Jeff’s), what are they trying to be? A diary or a news blog?