Stand by your story (in the archives)

A useful article at Online Journalism Review describes how a credit card spokeswoman repeatedly called a student newspaper, asking them to delete an article from the past — archived on the newspaper’s Web site — in which she was quoted.

The reporter had kept her notes, we reviewed them against the archived story and the now 2-year-old story remains unchanged in our archive. The spokeswoman’s discomfort with the story, particularly given her profession, I concluded, did not come close to a threshold for altering the permanent record.

I admire the approach taken. The article’s author (Elizabeth Zwerling, a professor and the newspaper’s faculty adviser) also noted that “this was a solid story by a conscientious reporter.” I think she was absolutely right to stand by the reporter and keep the record intact. To do otherwise would send a chilling message to the students who are learning the work of journalism.

The same sorts of requests are made of large daily newspapers, Zwerling writes. The motive behind the requests to “erase history”? We move forward in our lives, but our digital past refuses to be outpaced. People are unhappy at what Google or an online archives search reveals about who they used to be.

What’s the solution? I say we all need to construct and manage a digital identity, using a home page, a blog, an online résumé, or at least a site such as ClaimID or Naymz. That way, the person you are stands a chance of superseding the person you were.

Professors (including me) sometimes get requests from former students to delete files they created in a class — online files that now embarrass them because of errors, bad writing, or the subject matter. It’s one thing to create your own blog — you have control over that and can delete the embarrassing entries at a later date. But if you’ve handed work over to someone else, such as your teachers — you may find that they are unwilling to remove it.

A journalist might well think it’s unreasonable that a regular citizen wants an archived news story to be deleted. Why, that would be like rewriting history! But from the viewpoint of a person whose youthful indiscretion pops up at the top of a search results list, it’s not unreasonable at all.

The subject is worth writing about — in newspapers large and small. (The Washington Post put it on Page One in July.) It’s worth discussing in classes too (and not only in journalism classes). Let’s clue people in to the benefits of checking and controlling their profile in the digital world. After all, it’s getting harder to be invisible there.

Then maybe they’ll be less eager to try to erase the public record.

Update (10 a.m.): Poynter has an article about this topic.