Graduate School of Journalism student Dan Watson, editor of USC Annenberg's student-run Neon Tommy digital website, wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review about the ethics of unpublishing articles from online archives. Watson documented the case of a woman who asked him to unpublish an article because she worried that it might keep her from getting a job. In the archived story, the woman complained about work visa issues that forced her to take a lesser-paying job in Canada.
Now, she said, the visa problem had been solved, but potential employers might see her as a risk if they came across the article.
"That was when I realized our newsroom has no policy on what the industry has termed 'unpublishing' — the removal of online news articles," he wrote. "And I am not alone, says Kathy English, public policy editor at the Toronto Star." He wrote that few editors in America would remove the story. "In the end, we chose not to remove our article, because neither danger nor legal matters came into play," he wrote. "We came to that conclusion after talks with editors and professors, and research on policies across the news industry. Armed with a solid policy at our digital website, I’m confident editors are ready to deal with unpublishing requests in the future."
