Sources and record 2 min read
The silent edit: why headline revisions belong in the record
In plain words: news sites sometimes change a headline after it is published without saying so. We keep every version.
Published reporting is not fixed. Headlines and paragraphs change after release, and most readers never see the earlier version.
A page that was read at nine in the morning may not say the same thing at noon. Newsrooms update pages as events develop, and that is often the right thing to do. The trouble begins when the change is not marked: a number is softened, an attribution removed, a headline reworded to say something different from the first version.
Why a silent change matters
Analysts cite what they read. If the page has since changed, the citation points at a text that no longer exists. A colleague who checks the link a week later sees a different claim and may conclude the analyst misquoted. Worse, a decision may have been taken on wording that the publisher itself later withdrew.
Three kinds of change
- 01Marked corrections and updates, where the publisher says what changed and when. These are healthy and should be easy to find.
- 02Unmarked refinements: typo fixes, formatting and clarifications that do not change the claim. These can be listed without comment.
- 03Unmarked substantive changes: a figure, a name, an attribution or the thrust of a headline altered without notice. These are the ones a record must keep.
What keeping the record involves
The practice is simple to describe. Capture each version of a cited page with the time it was seen. Compare versions word by word. Classify the difference. Keep the earlier text, and link the dated capture from any analysis that relied on it. Nothing here accuses anyone. Plenty of edits are honest and improve the piece. The aim is that a reader can see what the page said when it was relied upon.
The record keeps what was said at the time it was said.
Edit history as a signal
A pattern of unmarked substantive edits is itself information about a source, and it feeds the source’s measured record. A single edit says little. Many, in one direction, on sensitive topics, say something that a reader ought to be able to weigh.
In 7Analytica this lives in the forensic record for each dispatch: dated captures, word-level differences and a plain classification, so that a change never goes unseen simply because nobody was watching at the moment it happened.