Observations On Mainstream Media’s Digital Editing

Having got the ’show edits’ feature turned on, on my news reader software NetNewsWire – I’ve started to notice a difference in editing and archiving styles between new and old media. New media like blogs tend make updates on old posts with new posts while old media like The Sun tend to rewrite and edit existing posts.

Pictured top and bottom are examples of where the Sun has gone back and re-edited an existing article.

I would hazard a guess that blogs and the like get traffic based on new content and therefore an additional post continues a conversation and encourages readers of RSS and newsletters to return for the update; and Google to index another page and mark it searchable.

Traditional newspaper’s use of writing a story and then editing it shows a different approach that revolves around the original post. The edit doesn’t however encourage readers to come back, nor Google to send more traffic. This is probably to do with the fact that the article is likely to be connected to the print version and the publishers want the articles to mirror each other. What would be interesting to see would be if they wrote and rewrote an article on the site over the course of the day for it to be published in the print the next.