@inproceedings{01HASAA0KJQCNZNHCCQ10VJYAS,
  abstract     = {{This paper draws attention to an understudied but crucial component of online news production, i.e. the practice of “incremental news updates” (Usher, 2018). The original news piece is replaced by the updated piece containing modifications ranging from minor corrections to further interpretation of news events, often without notifying the reader. Incremental news updates have mainly been studied in the context of breaking news (f.e. Ekström et al., 2021; Usher, 2018). Therefore, a first contribution of this paper is theoretical by studying corrections and updates in routine news coverage, to better understand to what extent this practice has permeated newsrooms and what kind of corrections/updates are typically done. The second contribution is methodological. Without denying the important contribution of previous research (f.e. Forde et al., 2022; Karlsson & Strömbäck, 2010; Saltzis, 2012; Widholm, 2016), researchers have been struggling with freezing the news flow and capturing different article versions. Inspired by the work of Kautsky and Widholm (2008), we apply regular interval content capturing to conduct a large-scale study on the usage of online news updates. Using in-house developed software, 291,666 articles and 197,979 associated updates written by six leading Flemish news outlets are collected. It is examined how commonly updates are applied and how they are conducted. Furthermore, a subset of 11,389 articles is manually analyzed to examine the reason(s) for applying updates. Finally, update patterns for different news outlets and topics are compared using Kruskal-Wallis tests. Results indicate that updates are commonly applied across all news outlets and topics. 35% of the articles are updated at least once and an updated article is updated 1.94 times on average. Approximately 4.2% of textual changes are made to correct objective or subjective errors, typically without any communication towards the reader. Therefore, we argue that transparency regarding news updates should be enhanced.

References
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  author       = {{Timmerman, Yoram and Bronselaer, Antoon and Van Leuven, Sarah}},
  booktitle    = {{Future of Journalism Conference 2023, Abstracts}},
  keywords     = {{journalism,news updates,regular interval content capturing,scraping,content analysis}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  location     = {{Cardiff, UK}},
  title        = {{'Last update 1 hour ago' : a large-scale study of incremental updates in Flemish online news}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}