Post Publication Pondering

In San Francisco, I attended a session led Hamline University's paper, The Oracle's Editor in Chief, Trevor Maine, and their and their faculty adviser, David Hudson.

Earlier in the fall, The Oracle experienced a dilemma of what to put into print and what to put online when several members of the football team wore black face paint for Halloween. The photos surfaced the following day on Facebook with the caption "spooks and ooks."

The Oracle decided to run the photo in print, but not online due to the never ending abyss of the internet and to not harm the six players in their future adult lives. If this was the right decision to make, I'm not sure, but the session did raise a lot of interesting questions and things to consider.

Some of these post publication considerations include:
-Accuracy of the original post
-Consequences for stakeholders, including your organization
-Integrity of historical record
-Would you be adding or subtracting from the story, or merely editing?

In addition to post publication considerations, there are also many pre-publication questions:
-Should we print?
-Should we post it online?
-Should we print but not post it? Or post it but not print it?
-What is the journalistic purpose of the article?
-And what is the journalistic purpose of this as an archive?
-Who are the stakeholders and what consequences might they face if we publish?
-What alternatives are there?

In an article by Bob Steele and Bill Mitchell on Poynter Online, they ask many of the same questions to make decisions to alter post publication, and also bring up another issue: transparency.

Hudson suggested that publications include a note at the top of the publication to let the reader know that an article has been changed and how, and I think that is a fair approach.

This led me to wonder about the Rissa Amen-Reif situation, should area publications who may have insinuated that alcohol played a factor in her death print a retraction? I believe the Reporter did print an editorial apologizing if we may have done so, but should publications also go back and edit previous stories?

In this case, I think not, since I believe it still serves an archival purpose, but I think this is something interesting to consider for future mistakes.