Different factual standards at LATimes.com?

From Jamie Gold on March 7, 2006 at 5:48 PM

Hi, I'm the readers' rep at the L.A. Times. Re your question "Is the LA Times' website edited to be 'less neutral" than the paper now.' No, the website is not edited to be "less neutral," especially if by "less neutral" you mean "inaccurate." That's not what I meant in my response to a reader's interesting question. Headlines online reflect the distinct personality that is latimes.com. I was responding to one reader about headline choices. The reader asked about a number of headlines, comparing those online with those in the newspaper (she actually thought that the online headlines were more accurate). L.A. Times editors who write headlines for articles, both online and in print in the paper, read the stories carefully before choosing how to capture the stories accurately, and I know in these cases editors both at the web and in the newsroom did so. Neither headline was wrong. I simply thought that the one headline in particular that appeared on that news story on the website included a voice that might not have been consistent with the voice of the print version of the paper (and in fact it was not, which is why the reader wrote). Editors in both the newsroom and at latimes.com serve their unique audiences - but they do not reflect a different standard of accuracy.

From Jon Garfunkel on March 7, 2006 at 8:32 PM

Why is it always up to the erstwhile Boston correspondent to actually query the great and mighty Google on these matters?

I keyed in the online headline into the search and got the article, from February 11th. It has the print headline now: Book Casts Doubt on Case for War.

Lopping off the first part "Book:" I see that this site referred to the old headline.

It seems rather strange to me as a reader that the same function of choosing a headline is handle by two separate editors-- it violates a notion of search integrity. Is every article subject to this? How would one cite such an article?

Still, on the subject of changing headlines, I will once again dispute the selection of headline by the OJR. This is a leading question, and it's not even germane. Someone not clicking on the story could well conclude the affirmative. I'd like to suggest instead that the the headline could have been, simply, "Same Story, Different Headlines." Or, if you wanted to go New York Post-style "Headline Offline Said Fine; Headline Online Bred Whine." Or maybe that's Dr. Seuss-style.

From Jon Garfunkel on March 8, 2006 at 6:59 AM

Forgive for this lapse-- Robert, I do appreciate your explaining the origin of diverging headlines. I'll take a peek into NewsML to see if it handles this.

From Brady Westwater on March 8, 2006 at 1:18 AM

When I log on at night to read the LA Times website, I have on many occasions found headlines that were highly partisan in nature to the point they distorted what the story actually said.

Usually they are changed within an hour or two - and almost always they are changed to reflect what the printed story says by the morning; but someone at the Times is clearly using the website at night to promote their own personal political agenda while the rest of the Times staff is asleep.

From Peter Anderson on March 9, 2006 at 2:51 AM

I'd like to suggest a couple less conspiratorial theories on these headline discrepencies. I've never worked for the LA Times, nor do I know anybody who does, so this is purely speculation on my part. However, I have worked at several other large newspaper websites so I'm familiar with the typical production processes. So, two reasons you're likely to see a different headline on a newspaper website than you see in your printed paper the next day:

1. The website uses an early version of the hed that gets rewritten for later versions of the paper. Normally, the website should pick up changes made by the print side, especially if the reason for the change is because the hed was misleading or biased. But sometimes the change gets overlooked, or else it's made late.

2. Early in the evening, before the paper's copy desks have written heds, the website editors are writing their own. In general, web staffs tend to be younger and less experienced than their print counterparts, so sometimes you end up with heds online that don't meet the standards expected on the print side. In some instances, through sloppiness, these heds might even survive on the final version of a web story and not be updated to reflect the print version.

I'm not saying those explanations excuse an inaccurate headline. But I'd consider those much more plausible possibilities for what's happening at the LAT than some vast conspiracy.