An incident at the New York Times shows that news lives on even when it’s taken offline.
The Nieman Journalism Lab tells the story of two NYT posts: one, which named the alleged blogger behind NYTPick.com, now removed; and another, updated with the journalist David Blum’s denial.
But at least part of the piece was easily recoverable via Google News and RSS readers (including the NYT’s own Times Wire).
NJL’s Zachary M Seward comments that ‘this is a lesson that removing content from the web is a futile task, particularly for big news sites’.
“And if a story needs to be retracted, if that’s the case here (update: it is), then we need better ways to do it than just pulling content off the web.”