Shakeups such as this don’t happen often — especially when they are related to publication of a single story. (That said, the T-J, under editor Shawna Richer, made a number of questionable moves in recent months.)

The New Brunswick news outlet, controlled by Irving-owned Brunswick News, announced this morning “there was no credible support” for the paper’s July 8, 2009 report that Prime Minister Stephen Harper “slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call ‘the host’ into his jacket pocket,” during a funeral mass for former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc. That’s bad enough. But the paper went on to apologize to the bylined reporters on the story for adding “inaccurate” statements “in the editing process” without their knowledge. Wow.

Still, I’m waiting to see what the paper does with the original story in its archives.

The July 8 story has no note either on the T-J’s site or in the NewsScan archive database that I referenced early on July 29. No mention of the correction or the apology. And no hypertext link between the two. Granted, it’s been only 18 hours since the T-J issued the statement and a notation could still be coming in a data dump. However, the paper should have made any change in conjunction with its public statement.

How should news media deal generally with stories they have determined to be substantially wrong?

Reuters released its style guide, called the Handbook of Journalism, on July 9, 2009. It outlines its internal filing procedures when “the story is fundamentally flawed” and notes that “this will alert our online colleagues to pull each version of the story from websites and to contact online customers to ask them to remove it.”

But simply removing all online evidence of an egregious error may not be the best practice. How can the audience be convinced an apology is comprehensive if the source document no longer exists? How can future researchers learn of errors in published stories? Would it not represent a step backward from the days when microfilm gave us the full published record, warts and all?

The New York Times sets a higher standard on these matters. The Times website still hosts the full stories published by Jayson Blair, the reporter the Times revealed in 2003 as having committed “frequent acts of journalistic fraud.” In addition, it annotates each page of his stories with known inaccuracies. For example, this 2002 story on the investigation into the Washington-area sniper contains a long list of corrections.

Many news organizations still lag in fully linking corrections and apologies to the originally published items. Many more succumb to the temptation to simply wipe clean the source of the embarrassment. I hope this won’t be the case here. There is an opportunity for the T-J to turn a major embarrassment into a minor source of pride.

David Schlesinger said in a speech to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission that London 2012 will be covered by “Twitterers sitting in the stadium banging out the result in a Tweet from their mobile phone.” (2012?)

He called on organizers to step back from their hard-line policy on the issue: “It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and media-enabled public, and not against them.”

The Vancouver organizing committee for the 2010 Winter Games is prohibiting spectators from:

Broadcasting or recording through the use of cellular phones or other recording or transmitting devices (e.g., two-way radios, recording devices, PDAs, or video cameras), use of flash photography or other lighting devices (e.g., laser pens, etc.)

In addition, it decrees that “spectators must consent to being inspected for prohibited and restricted items” while explicitly stating it will not provide storage for seized items.

The restrictions reflect the attitude in February 2005 when Bell Globemedia and Rogers Communications Inc. paid a record US$153 million for the Canadian rights to both the 2010 Winter Games and the 2012 Summer Games.

Ivan Fecan, Globemedia’s president and chief executive officer, told the Globe and Mail (one of its properties): “By 2012, we think there will be so much digital proliferation in the country that there will be opportunities in all of these platforms that we haven’t even thought of. And that doesn’t even deal with what might be available from mobile video and other applications.”

The assumption then was the companies could cash in on a broadcast monopoly in a wireless environment. But that was before Twitter and Facebook — and the iPhone.