Both Versions of Romney Critique Should Have Remained on Web

September 13, 2012, 6:02 pm

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

It's standard practice for news organizations to change breaking news stories as more information comes in. You start with what you know at, say, 6 p.m., and add to it, change it, refine it as the night goes on.

Journalists call this a “write-through.” In the pre-Internet days, you might see those changes happening from one printed edition of a newspaper to a later edition. Or you might not see the changes at all: they would happen before the newspaper went to press. Only the final version would see the light of day.

These days, those changes happen on the Web site, in real time. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But the number of changes â€" and the content of those changes â€" i n a politically volatile Times story Wednesday evening and on Thursday's front page have readers and pundits charging that the early version of the story was inappropriately “scrubbed” or “wiped out.”

Some readers were more polite than others in asking about it, after the blog Talking Points Memo raised the question, calling the stories “dramatically different.” Josh Marshall, the blog's editor, noted: “Pieces get rewritten all the time, especially with a breaking news story. But this would seem to require some explanation.”

And readers who saw Mr. Marshall's post, and who compared the two stories, agreed:

“Seems, well, odd, to put it kindly,” Wendy Woolpert said. Another, David Scott, was more direct: “Are you guys busted? Newspaper of record? Really??”

The original story, posted early Wednesday evening, was by David E. Sanger and Ashley Parker, under a headline “Behind Romney's Decision to Attac k Obama on Libya.” Its theme was that Mitt Romney's criticism of President Obama on Tuesday evening was seen as clumsy and badly timed. Most notable about it, perhaps, was a telling quote from an unnamed senior adviser to Mr. Romney: “We've had this consistent critique and narrative on Obama's foreign policy, and we felt this was a situation that met our critique, that Obama really has been pretty weak in a number of ways on foreign policy, especially if you look at his dealing with the Arab Spring and its aftermath.”

Another startling anonymous quote, attributed to an adviser to the Romney campaign who had worked in the George W. Bush administration, also disappeared. Mr. Romney looked like “he had forgotten the first rule in a crisis: don't start talking before you understand what's happening,” according to the adviser.

The write-through version of the story several hours later, which completely replaced the earlier story on the Times Web site, bore a byline of Peter Baker and Ashley Parker. Its headline was “A Challenger's Criticism Is Furiously Returned,” and Mr. Sanger's name dropped to a contributing byline at the end of the story.

The key quotes dropped off altogether, as did almost all the original wording of the story. It was, therefore, a very different story, though its overall thrust was the same: criticism of Romney's clumsiness and bad timing.

I asked David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief, for an explanation.

“What really happened is what happens with a moving story,” he said. “We sharpen stories, we refine them. The notion that a story was ‘scrubbed' from the Web is just wrong.”

Mr. Leonhardt noted: “We sometimes treat the new one as a different story,” thus leaving both stories there for readers to view. In this case, the original was replaced.

“Were they different enough to leave up the old one?” he said. “That's a completely legitimate argument. ”

Mr. Leonhardt said his thinking was that “the thrust of the discussion did not change: that Romney seemed to fumble this.”

As for the key quotes, Mr. Leonhardt agreed that there's a reasonable question of whether “a punchier anonymous quote should be replaced by a slightly less punchy named quote.”

“I am much more comfortable, when it's a close call, in erring on the side of taking out anonymous quotes,” he said.

There's another issue here. The first story did a much better job of nailing the “badly timed” aspect of the story, with its sentence: “So, on Tuesday evening, Mr. Romney, according to his staff, signed off on a blunt attack on a statement issued earlier in the day â€" before the first protests had happened â€" by the American Embassy in Cairo.”

In the rewriting, the timing issue was, if not lost, then certainly blurred. If you'd like to compare the two stories, you can do so on NewsDiffs.org.

The matter of how The Times and other news organizations should deal with changing stories is an evolving one, and one that previous public editors have written about. It's sure to come up again, given the way news is changing in the digital age.

But in this case, the stories were very different in wording, if not in intent, and the quotes from Romney advisers were striking ones to remove altogether.

It's clear to me that these two versions should have been treated as different stories and that both should have remained accessible on the Web site.