Ethan Zuckerman refers to Dan Gillmor’s slow news advocacy here, and he extends the concept to journalism criticism, the stories about stories that critics write. His post traces the update history of a recent story about a story that dominated the news cycle for a few days last week. He says, “What I’d love to be able to do is compare the current version of [the] story with the one that originally ran.” He suggests the Wikipedia edit history model as a tool that would help us understand the origins and subsequent iterations of fast breaking stories. Sounds good to me. One of my biggest gripes about web info is the lack of temporal referents. Even Amazon is stingy with the copyright and publication dates of the books it sells.
I’d find it handy if web narratives contained both publication dates and a history of editorial changes. How can we make that happen?
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