The Morin File

Props to the Washington Post online not only for answering my questions at today's live chat  but also posting my web address. This blog was launched to critique the Post, and providing free publicity to a critic reflects well on washingtonpost.com

But naturally I would think that.

Reporter Richard Morin and polling expert Claudia Deane answered all three of my questions, two of which address the points raised in my blogging on subject of the poll stories. Below the fold is a reprint of those exchanges in their entirety, my comments to follow. Morin's two main points as I see them  are:

1. We have a test strategy of running a teaser story online, with second-tier questions that won't steal the thunder of the main story, which later runs in the hard-copy Post.  The story I posted Monday morning reflects answers to the questions we chose.

2. On urls that bury the original story, and this is a quote, Argh! Longer, paraphrased answer: They were supposed to fix that--there should be a record of the initial post, though minor revisions shouldn't ruin your whole day.

Click "Continued" for the transcript--

Manassas, Va.: Richard, my question is about the accuracy of your initial story yesterday and the extent to which that version disappeared with rewrites later that day. Your 8:42 a.m. online version was posted for most of the day and ignored virtually every Bush-positive finding. Three subsequent versions including one at 6:24 p.m, another at 7:08 p.m. and today's hard-copy A1 version co-written with Dan Balz (and stat expert Claudia Deane) much more accurately report the pro- and anti-Bush findings. Yet all of these versions used the exact same url/web address, sending your initial story down the memory hole as detailed at my blog, PostWatch.

(PostWatch)

What happened? And why did the initial version disappear without explantion? Do you agree that your first story was unbalanced, and that deleting it from public view raises questions about accountability?

Richard Morin:
First let me acknowledge that it’s absolutely true that Dan, Claudia and I work hard to keep each of us on the straight-and-narrow. It should go without saying that our collaborative work is better than anything each of us could have produced by ourselves.

That said, let me explain a bit about the preview story that is posted in the morning on the day that a poll is released and why it is different than the final version of the story that appears in the evening and, ultimately, in next morning’s Washington Post.

For the past two months, we and our colleagues at ABC have selected two or three questions—no more--from the poll to preview in short stories that run on washingtonpost.com and on Good Morning America. We try to restrict ourselves to questions that will not be the major news of our main stories that will run in the paper the next day or on the evening news that night. For obvious reasons, we do not want to scoop ourselves (though we sometimes do). The preview story is written immediately after we receive the survey results in the wee hours of the morning and filed to the website before I even start to think about the main story. We do this to generate traffic to our excellent web site and, frankly, to promote the full story that will be released later in the day. We currently are doing this early release as an experiment. We at the Post are not yet sure if it is worth it.

For this poll, we decided on Friday to feature the questions testing claims made by Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoeezza Rice. These three questions hung together well. They were, we thought, second-tier questions, and would not detract from the other Iraq questions that we intended to use in a major story to set up President Bush’s major address on Iraq tonight. As it happened, such a large majority of Americans seemed to reject Cheney’s claims that the insurgency was in its “last throes” that it became a key part of the main story, after the finding that few Americans favored immediate withdrawal. These three questions were, and this is important, the only questions that we agreed to release at 7 a.m. We could not use any other question, per our agreement. Nor would we have wanted to—my goal is getting the best story possible in the newspaper and not give it away on the web 24 hours before our readers see it in their paper. Also note that every early release story I’ve done for the web—I believe it’s four and counting—has included a paragraph noting that the full survey results and complete story will be released at 5 p.m. We want people who read the preview story at 7 a.m. (okay, sometimes it’s a few minutes late being posted)—then return at 5 p.m. for the complete story.

     Why did I write the early morning story by myself? I’m a morning person. Dan and Claudia like to sleep in.

(I'm with Dan and Claudia. Here's question number two--PW:)

Manassas, Va.: Richard, thank you for the detailed response. But among other things, I was very surprised to see subsequent versions of the story referenced by the identical url. That means that unless somebody happens to print out a copy of your original story (ahem), there's no record of how you first portrayed the poll. Do you, or The Post institutionally, agree that this is a problem?

Richard Morin: Argh! There should be a record of the posting. They promised me when the same goof occurred last time that it would be fixed. But please don't go crazy trying to interpret the changing time stamp. I see a typo or decide to add a paragraph (as I did yesterday to the preview story when I inadvertely left off the graph about the whole poll beinbg released at 5 p.m.) and the time stamp changes. God bless you and your fellow bloggers, but you have 'way too much time on your hands! :)