Columbus Dispatch Lets Down Readers by Unpublishing Story

By: Anna Clark | CJR

Each day, editors across the country make choices about what news is “fit to print.” But what about the news that’s fit to un-print?

That was the question faced last week at the Columbus Dispatch, where the editor had second thoughts about a politically sensitive story hours after it appeared on the paper’s site. The decision to pull the article—and the manner in which it was pulled—underscores how, years into the digital era, there aren’t widely understood conventions on when and why to unpublish a story.