Conflicting accounts
- 14 Jun 07, 10:38 AM
The announcement by Jamaican police that Bob Woolmer wasn't murdered as they originally said, but died of natural causes, raised a question for our online coverage.
As pointed out by Torin Douglas , there are lots of stories left in the website archive that report the earlier version of events - so anyone who types in a search will find the conflicting accounts.
Is this a problem? I'd say anyone using an online search to get information should, and in most cases would, in any case be looking at where and when the information originated, and judging it accordingly. The datestamp on any story is a crucial bit of information.
In this case the stories all have a datestamp and they give the fullest account, based on what the police were saying, that was available at the time they were written. Going back to change them would confuse, not clarify the sequence of events - when did the police view changes, what was known when?
To try and steer readers through the potential confusion, we ran a relating how the story changed over time, with links to the key developments. This, along with the latest news story, appears alongside all the archived stories, as well as the current ones.
So we're not rewriting the archive, but there are hopefully enough signposts in there for anyone searching online to work out what happened when.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
