Maybe Journalists need to be better at their jobs and just more honest in general? Major publications should have revision history links as articles are changed. If anything some of them are clearly going out of their way to cover their tracks as the narrative changes.

I understand mistakes happen, but you should be always very clear on your corrections and if you are a web publication, have revision history links.

Source: Journalism degree holder that is tired of the MSM. I advise all the people I know to stop reading/watching it. So tired of the outrage driven news cycle that is often highly misleading.

This isn’t any different than Wikipedia. If the news article was more like a Wiki (with revision history), would that be sufficient for you?

> If the news article was more like a Wiki (with revision history), would that be sufficient for you?

Not the person you were replying to, but I would love this, yeah. That changelog proposal being implemented would be more than enough to resolve most of the issues I have with publications that silently alter contents of their articles after they were originally published (without indicating that an alteration took place).

Sure, but they need to be clear that they aren’t committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish (expectation of a newspaper).

If they want to be an encyclopedia then be one.

> Sure, but they need to be clear that they aren’t committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish (expectation of a newspaper).

You're misreading the situation. The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do. They can be "committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish," but then new stuff happens after that time, or they have the time to go into more depth. The news isn't just about accuracy, it's also about timeliness.

>The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do.

Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.

But since they are human, sometimes mistakes are made, and I think it's pretty dishonest to quietly change an article after it's been published. Publishing a story should mean that you back its content 100%, and it's the best, most accurate story you could have written with all available information. If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.

> Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.

Well, breaking news stories is their job an no one else's.

> If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.

I'm sure a front page of mea culpas and minutiae about the process of reporting itself would scratch some people's ideological itches, but it wouldn't actually be very useful as an information source about what the current state of things are, which is what people are actually going there to get.

Personally I'd prefer they just issue a new version of the story with a kind of version history (or at least leave the old version up somewhere), at least for major revisions, but I also kind of empathize with them not wanting to do that, because that would probably be a feature almost exclusively used by annoying pests trying to stir up BS outrage (e.g. like the kind of people who think that software should never have bugs).

This seems like it would be a mess. My local news has a weather page that they constantly update. Sometimes 10 times an hour. While some people, like you, care about the original accuracy, I think most people don’t care at all about the past forecasts. I think a bunch of links and references to a change of the 1pm temperature forecast from 86 to 87 degrees would be more annoying than useful.

Do you know what “at the time of publish” means?

By having a fluid changing story, two people won’t even have the same reference point if they both read the same NYTimes article.