Laurie Goodstein covers one of the most scrutinized beats at The Times. As national religion correspondent, her recent articles on Pope Francis have been the topic of plenty of conversation and discussion â€" and have had very heavy readership.
The article I'm writing about now garnered nearly 1,500 reader comments and a long perch on the most e-mailed list.  It reported on the pope's surprising interview with a Jesuit publication in which he said that the Roman Catholic Church was unduly obsessed with subjects like homosexuality, birth control and abortion.  The article went online first on Thursday, Sept. 19, then appeared in print on Friday, Sept. 20.
Ms. Goodstein wrote to me this week, hoping to clarify my discussion in a recent blog post of that article's evolution.  My post took up the frequent changes made to news stories online in the course of a daily news cycle.
“I'm concerned that your column leaves the impression that the piece was intentionally softened or tweaked, perhaps because of some outside pressure, when that was not at all the case,†she wrote.
I was responding to an e-mail from a reader, Kevin Loker, who gave several examples of where language had changed substantially in her story. He wondered whether an editor's note might be in order to describe why those changes â€" which he saw as softening â€" were made. (For example, he noted that words like “in remarkably blunt language†were removed, as were sentences including: “The 12,000-word interview ranges widely, and may confirm what many Catholics already suspected: that the chameleon-like Francis bears little resemblance to those on the church's theological or political right wing.†Another sentence that was in the early version and not in the later version was: “Those who seek a broad revival of the Tridentine Mass have been among Francis's harshest critics, and those remarks are not likely to comfort them.â€)
I asked Ms. Goodstein if I could share her note with readers of this blog, because it helps to explain how the online editing process works. She agreed, saying that although her note was meant for me, it might “lift the curtain†for readers about how breaking stories evolve through online changes. She wrote:
The changes in that article were not done, as the reader suggests, to soften the language or the headline. It was entirely because of the timing in the roll-out of that story. Here's how it came down:
I wrote the first version on Wednesday night, because the Jesuit publication slipped me and two or three other reporters an advance copy of the interview with Pope Francis very late Wednesday afternoon. We ran that story as soon as the embargo lifted, at 11 a.m. on Thursday. Because of the heads-up, we had a story far more complete than most of our competitors. But because of the embargo, I could not do any additional reporting or interviews with other sources about the pope's comments â€" because no one else had yet gotten wind of the pope's interview.
The pope's interview caused an immediate sensation, and I spent the day interviewing sources and gathering reaction. So the next version of the story, which was posted on the Web later that day and ran in the next day's paper, reflected that reporting. It was a total “writethru,†merging the news of the pope's interview with the news of its impact.
A “writethru†is not polishing or tweaking a story â€" it is a rewrite to update and reflect new information.
I've written before that when an early version of a story is substantially rewritten â€" when it is really a new story rather than a revised version of the first one â€" a new URL should be assigned by an editor so that both can be archived. That doesn't always happen, and did not here, but it would have been a good idea.
Ms. Goodstein's note also brings up the matter of embargoes on news stories â€" an interesting topic, but one for another day.
