A Systematic Analysis of Post-Publication Edits on Flemish News Sites

The final session at this Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with Yoram Timmerman, whose interest is in incremental online news updates. The ability to update news in this way is very different from other news formats, and especially print, of course; information may now be added, removed, or otherwise modified as new details arise. This can be detected computationally by comparing multiple versions of the same article, but there is very limited research on such changes to date – perhaps because of the need for more complex methods for the systematic analysis of such changes.

This study, then, explores how such news updates are being used by Flemish online news sites. It scraped content from six Flemish news sites between April 2019 and March 2021, visiting articles every 15 minutes for 24 hours after their publication, and identifying any updates. This produced some 300,000 articles and some 200,000 updates (frequently updated liveblogs as well as articles behind paywalls were not included here); the researchers then also manually coded the updates on some 7,500 such articles.

Updates were very unevenly distributed – some 35% of articles are updated, but this ranges from 20% for Knack to 60% for the public media organisation VRT NWS. More than 80% were updated only once or twice; some 5% were updated more than nine times. Overall, some 44% were content-changing updates; 30% were content-neutral changes; 18% corrected linguistic errors; and 4% corrected objective (wrong names or affiliations) or subjective errors (missing information etc.). Almost all error corrections were made silently – this means that there is a lack of disclosure transparency towards readers.