Bas Timmers on updating the news online

Writing at the Online Journalism Blog, Bas Timmers of the Volkskrant newspaper has some interesting suggestions for updating the news online. He suggests that, as news stories on websites are constantly updated and changing, back copies should be made available in order to ensure readers have full access to the rumours and reports that are the backbone of any story.

Timmers goes on to highlight the legal implications: if a story was slanderous and then altered, the individual concerned would have no evidence with which to highlight an injustice. An extract:

'A visitor to the site has to trust the news. But what to believe if that news changes? What is accurate? The latest version, the reporter replies.

But it can’t be so simple that you just overwrite the earlier version and pretend that it wasn’t ever there? That is utterly confusing for visitors that read the previous versions. And it would make it all too simple for journalists to hide their previous mistakes.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a huge advantage that you can nowadays through the Internet make your stories more accurate along the way. But it should also be compulsory to make earlier versions of the story accessible to the public.'

The issue of trust is an important one. My immediate reaction, if asked which version of an online news story to belieive, would be to give credence to the latest version, as this would appear to be the best informed and most up-to-date. However, part of me feels that it would be more confusing to offer multiple time-dependent versions of the same story with all differences between them being wide open and possibily contradictory.

One of the beauties of online news is the ability to update, change, modify and confirm aspects of a story as they develop. However this can lead to rumours and when corrected, it can appear as if they never existed. Providing back copies could be a useful tool to prevent allegations and provide a log of hard evidence, but considering how quickly stories can change I'm sceptical as to its feasibility.

As an example, over the past week most if not all major news outlets will have had their primary story as covering the global financial crisis. This one story could remain there for 12 hours or more, constantly being modified with new figures, quotes, pictures, videos and links being inserted and removed every 10 minutes or so. In reality,ould keeping each of these separate versions be more of a hassle than it's worth?