Earlier, I blogged about the seriously flawed Telegraph article about rape. Now Carl Zimmer has discovered that the newspaper has yanked the article from its site. No explanation, no apology - it's just gone.
I feel silly that I didn't grab a screencapture of the original article. Although I'm aware that nothing is immutable on the Internet, it just didn't occur to me that someone would yank a published article from a newspaper with no explanation. I guess we have to think of online newspapers as unreliable AND impermanent. Ephemeral, in fact - just like the real, pulpy, newsprint-smudgy ones. Awesome.
Of course, though nothing is immutable, it's also true that nothing disappears completely on the internet. And another blog, The Hand Mirror, has the text of the article -- although it's slightly different than the text I saw when I wrote my blog post. I'm not sure how many versions the Telegraph did of this thing. Sigh.
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Maybe a lawyer whispered in their ear? (Possibly one from their own camp.)
Interesting that they have (apparently!) been tweaking the on-line version.
Have you tried the Google cache?
I don't know if that necessarily has anything to do with the particular story in question being controversial or likely to bring criticism. I think it's reasonably common for multiple versions of a story to exist on a newspaper's site, I've certainly seen it before. I assume they get edited for a variety of reasons. One might be the version posted for the web and one might be the version for the print edition, which might not be identical for reasons not related to the potential to draw criticism.
Google doesn't have a cached version, which you may have already known.
Have you checked the Wayback Machine? They should have some snapshot of the page at archive.org.
There's a difference between writing different copy for the web and tweaking an article, which I meant to imply altering portions of the article after the web copy has been released.
To me, they're not going to pay for further editing unless there is a reason. Businesses aren't inclined to spend money on "nothing much", after all! Pretty much the only reasons I can think of for editing an article after the release are language errors that are bad enough that they can't stand as they are, response to criticisms, substantial new facts changing the material the article is based on, or legal issues/challenges.
Pulling it entirely does strongly indicate some wasn't right :-) Lack of admission of fault possibly suggests they don't want to incriminate themselves, as it were.
(Conspiracies are fun...)