Do you fix old blog entries?<\/p>\n
Can readers tell?<\/p>\n
I notice that my weblog editing programs, Radio and Manila, maintain an item’s original post date and time, even if I modify it a day or two later — as I’ve done a couple of times with the items on this page. At least that’s the case with the programs’ default templates and settings.<\/p>\n
I doubt that I have enough of a readership to notice when I update something… However, the general issue has me curious:<\/p>\n
When and why do people go back and edit blog entries?<\/p>\n
<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n The question isn’t very significant for a casual blog, but imagine a candidate saying “If you want to know my stand on abortion, look what I said in my blog last March…” Readers would not be able to tell whether the original document had been modified.<\/p>\n (Of course, they could also check the archives of the Times<\/span> and Washington Post<\/span>… On a major issue those “newspapers of record” would have information — and their reporters certainly would raise a red flag if a candidate was engaging in Stalinist revisionism<\/a> online.)<\/p>\n Minor case in point… I’m typing this in a rush, but I may come back later and link it to some sample corrections pages or other resources. I’ve done that once already….<\/p>\n It got a bit longer, so I wrote a short summary, changed the headline and made the longer version this linked story-page. Tomorrow I could decide it was all a dumb idea and erase the whole thing. Or I might just replace it with a link) if I discover that someone else has already written a master’s thesis, Poynter essay or Online Journalism Review article<\/a> on a closely-related subject.<\/p>\n In fact, the reference to OJR as a possible source was in my first draft, but the link wasn’t… a day later I discovered the actual Mark Glaser article. A week later, I noticed Dan Kennedy, Boston Phoenix columnist<\/a>, handling a correction in an Aug. 17 story by presenting both a new Aug. 21 item and a “Note: This item was later corrected” entry, with link, on the old version. And then I stumbled on Adrian Holovaty’s blog transcript<\/a> of Glaser’s interview with him for the OJR article.<\/p>\n (For the record, I also came back to this page August 27 to do some editing, add links and bullets.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you fix old blog entries? Can readers tell? I notice that my weblog editing programs, Radio and Manila, maintain an item’s original post date and time, even if I modify it a day or two later — as I’ve done a couple of times with the items on this page. At least that’s the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-18","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/stepno\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}