The Herald Letter

I've been meaning to post the edited Miami Herald letter below for a couple of days. It was first dug up by Herald Watch and posted on Critical Miami. The letter regards the arrest of Herald reporter Oscar Corral and was written by Paul Crespo, a journalist who has written for the Herald and was one of the Marti Moonlighters exposed by Corral last year:

Everything underlined is added and everything crossed out is deleted from the original.

Henry over at Herald Watch believes Crespo didn't deserve to

have his opinions reduced by 40 percent and that the newspaper the Herald "leaves readers with the impression that it's is not afraid to publish criticisms of itself, when in reality its very sensitive of them."

You can expect Henry to have a strong POV -- he's a card-carrying member of the Miami Mafia. I say that in jest after the hub-bub of last week, but you get the point. Alesh at Critical Miami has a more nuanced take:

They’ve selected one particular point he made and deleted the material that’s tangential to that point. In the process, much of the anger obvious in the original has been sapped. There’s no question that the Herald editors have the right to do this. The question becomes, again, what should newspapers do differently in light of the internet?

A commenter on HW says: "On the web, there is little space limitation. They could have at least published the full version online.” More interestingly, they could publish both versions online, and let us see the edits. Such radical transparency seems to be the direction the internet is pushing all business, and it’s not ironic that newspapers are getting pushed in this direction, too.