How newsrooms handle requests to change old stories
Someone asks a paper to correct an old story, add an update, take their name out, keep it out of search results, or take it down. We document what newsrooms say they do and, where we can, what they actually do.
The Policy Atlas lists 1,814 U.S. newsrooms and journalism organizations so far: the 1,800 that NSMPA researched, and 14 more from its list of known policies. An automated first pass found a published policy on old stories at 135 of them, plus 17 broadcasters that were added because they were already known to have one. None of those has been checked by a person yet. That is the next job, along with asking editors directly what their policy is, including newsrooms that have never written one down.
We don't rate newsrooms and we aren't a reputation-management service. A newsroom that never changes an old story is recorded with the same care as one that often does.
Where to go
- Look up a newsroom
- Each record links to the pages and documents it is based on, with dates.
- Read the model policy
- A policy a newsroom can adapt, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
- See how records are made
- What counts as evidence, how each code is assigned, and how mistakes get corrected.
- Download the data
- Everything on the site, as CSV and JSON.
Where things stand
The project is new. The methodology, charter and model policy are written, but nobody outside the project has reviewed them yet. The first verified sample will be 50 to 100 newsrooms. Until then, nothing here is a national statistic.
Latest
The Permanence Paradox: Research Prospectus and National Research Program
Working paper, not yet reviewed outside the project, version 1.0
Sets out the central and supporting research questions, competing perspectives to investigate, intended scholarly outputs, and the design of three studies: a systematic national content analysis, an institutional transparency survey, and a longitudinal archival practice analysis.