Common Sense Journalism

Are your archives a 'digital dilemma'?

By Doug Fisher

What would you do if a woman whose picture was in your archives asked you to remove it because she no longer weighed that much and was being ridiculed when people saw it?

How about the 30-year-old man who says the 11-year-old story about his marijuana arrest hurts him when prospective employers see it on your Web site? Or the woman who says her teenage daughter is being stalked by an online predator who saw the girl's two-year-old picture?

More than a third of the newspaper executives responding to a survey this summer said they had handled similar requests to alter or expunge an item kept in an archive or long term on the newspaper's Web site.

Generally, the answer is a resounding "no." But a woman called one paper and asked that her child's photo be removed. She feared that her ex-husband, against whom she had a restraining order, would come after them. It was taken down.

Another paper said it had removed crime reports where someone complained that the person was found not guilty or the charges were dropped.

Larry Timbs, a Winthrop University professor; Will Atkinson, who graduated from there this past year; and I did the research earlier this year with the cooperation of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. Sixty-three executives responded, mostly editors, managing editors or publishers. The 17.5 percent response was a bit disappointing but still provides a starting point in an area that has seen little research.

We presented the paper recently at the National Newspaper Association, which co-sponsored the 13th annual "Newspapers and Community-Building" symposium.

The saying that journalism is "the first draft of history" most often is credited to former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham. Those responding to our survey overwhelmingly (95 percent) supported not changing that draft. That's not surprising, but sometimes it's good to put numbers to what you think you know.

"The requests are too numerous to mention," one editor wrote. "We have give(n) them the same answer we've provided to you: Though your life may have changed, this is still a part of what made you who you are."

Newspaper executives might want to be a little cautious before they get too smug, however. Previous research has shown a high error rate in archives and has documented how stories have been withheld for competitive and other reasons. So if then, why not now, your public might ask.

In our research, there also was a clear shift. No one favored honoring a potential political candidate's plea to take down his decade-old DUI arrest. But the woman's plea to remove her child's picture fell on friendlier ears – 22 percent would do it or consider it. The other scenarios fell in-between. (Not all were hypothetical – that request from the woman who had slimmed down was real. It came to our college practicum paper. We debated it and eventually took it down during a move to a new Web site provider.)

Employers are turning to digital archives and other corners of the Web almost as a routine these days. Privacy fears mount.

Strong arguments are made that news organizations aren't the culprits when an item can be quickly sucked into search engine archives to live forever. But we also occupy a special place, one we have set for ourselves with ethics codes like that of the Society of Professional Journalists, which says, if nothing else, do no harm. Will the public buy the "not our fault" argument?

To crib from the title of a book by Robert Berkman and Christopher Shumway, our archives may be a "digital dilemma," one of many that newsroom managers suddenly find they may have to deal with.

The law has a term for how things used to be, when you had to go to the newspaper office or local library and pore through the microfilm or even piles of yellowed clippings (if there even was public access). But like many things in this digital age, "practical obscurity" is rapidly eroding, and so may be the protection it implied.

Among some of the other things we found:

– Most commonly (51 percent) news organizations archive only local stories, whether they ran online only or in the paper. But 11 percent said they archived local and wire service copy.

– About 90 percent reported archiving photos, most commonly local only.

– Fewer than half (46 percent) said multimedia elements were archived,

– No one's getting rich off archives: More than half said archives were free. A little more than a third said their archives produced less than $1,000 a year; 4 percent said it was as high as $50,000. But more than half said they did not know.

Of most concern, only a third of the editors and publishers said they had a policy for dealing with requests to remove material. Given how quickly things move in this digital age, if you don't have one, it's probably time to think about it.

(If you want a full copy of the paper, e-mail me.)

Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at dfisher@sc.edu or 803-777-3315.