If you’re not interested in the process for publishing news on the Isle of Wight, you might want to skip past this article.
You’ll be aware of the difficulty VB had trying to make head nor tail of the public responses to proposed constituency changes yesterday. We found them impenetrable, publishing an article saying so.
Earlier yesterday, the County Press ran quite a different story. Broadly speaking they pointed out that the public responses had been released, suggesting you go to the Boundary Commission Website to read them over.
VB commentor ABC posted their views on the CP coverage this morning. By using phrases like ‘this is a major Island issue and deserves better reporting than this’, it’s clear that they were none to impressed.
Nick: ‘Something for the MP?’
A few hours after we’d posted our ‘impenetrable’ story, Nick commented on VB last night, “Is this something that our M.P. should be taking up with the boundary commission ?”
Well today, happily MP Andrew Turner seems to be in agreement, as the CP have this afternoon run a story titled ‘Commission criticised over consultation website‘. (We’ve got an article coming with some details from Andrew).
Deja Vu?
It opens, “The public responses to Boundary Commission proposals to carve up the Isle of Wight into two were published online on a specially created website yesterday (Tuesday), inviting people to comment on the representations”, which are mysteriously (or not) are pretty much the same words that opened their article yesterday.
Would you believe it? Going back to re-read yesterday’s CP article, we found the original article has vanished from their Website.
Re-write
A hasty re-write or desire of a different angle to the story perhaps? That could well explain why Ross Findon has the By-line on today’s article and Martin Neville is listed as the Reporter at the bottom of the article.
The Tweet that they automatically released at the time, still exists, providing an audit trail to the original article.
More accountable these days
Getting rid of articles isn’t just as simple as deleting them off the Website. The world is a more complex – and accountable – place now.
