Oops! The
New York Post trumpeted "
KERRY PICKS GEPHARDT" ... and after the announcement that
John Edwards would be the Democratic running mate, bloggers delighted in linking to the story. But shortly afterward, the site was updated with Associated Press coverage and
the embarrassing page was removed from the site. Of course, this should reopen the debate about how to handle errors on the web: Leave the story online with a prominent correction attached, or simply "disappear" the original?
By 9:30 a.m. U.S. Eastern time, the only trace of the
Post story was a reference on Google, which doesn't cache news search items the way it does ordinary web pages. This isn't the first time a big news site jumped the gun with the wrong story; the most notable early example was the big "GUILTY" headline
briefly displayed on Time's Pathfinder site after the
O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. (Update: Blogger
Sid the Fish provided a
screen shot of the now-missing Post story as it appeared on the Web.)
And
Amy Gahran points out that this reinforces the importance of journalists and bloggers grabbing an archive version of such pages when they're available, using the browser's "Save As" feature, a screen shot, or something like
Furl, which
she reviews on her blog. I suppose this is a trickier issue in the world...
