Model Policy

A written policy a newsroom can adapt for handling requests about old stories: when to correct, update, add an editor's note, remove a name, keep a story out of search results, take it down, or leave it alone, and how to handle an appeal. Each of those is its own decision.

It's a first draft (version 1.0), and as far as we know no newsroom uses it yet. Check it against your own legal advice, contracts and publishing system before adopting it. Adopting it has no effect on how we record your newsroom.

Read and download

• Read the full Model Policy and Implementation Annex
• Download editable Markdown (bracketed fields for your publication)
• Citing and adapting AEP materials

What it contains

1. Governing principles: accuracy, historical integrity, continuing public interest, compassion and proportionality, editorial independence, transparency.
2. Seven remedies, considered individually or in combination, including "no change."
3. Ten review criteria, weighed together with no point system or automatic outcome.
4. Later legal outcomes, without treating dismissal, acquittal, vacatur, and expungement as the same thing.
5. Procedure: intake, timelines, decision authority (student editors retain control at student outlets), reconsideration.
6. Technical limits of de-indexing, stated plainly.
7. Implementation Annex: form fields, a decision-memo template, a de-indexing checklist, an example editor's note, an adoption checklist.

The case against

We plan to publish a commentary explaining each part of the policy, and a paper making the strongest case against de-indexing. Neither is written yet. If you're an editor who thinks de-indexing is a mistake, we'd like to hear your argument.