Decades ago a person could attend a major university, get photographed during an ill-advised fraternity stunt, have the photo appear in the newspaper, then have his antics fade into memory. The stories and photos remained in newspaper archives at libraries and at the newspapers themselves, part of the historical record, but finding them took great effort that no one, unless the subject was important enough to have a biographer, would undertake.

Today, it’s just a matter of punching a name into a search engine.

As a result, newspapers, including the Journal-World, are getting more and more requests to take previously published content off our websites. The term that’s become popular among web publishers is “unpublishing.” I want to spend some time today explaining why we don’t do that.

A typical conversation with someone who wants us to remove content goes like this: I was young, I was silly, I didn’t really believe what I told the reporter, and now it’s causing me problems. Potential employers see it when I apply for jobs. It causes me personal distress because I know it’s there. I don’t hold the same views as I did when I was interviewed and so therefore I’d like that record removed.

We’ve had calls from people who are now divorced who want us to remove their wedding announcements because it causes them discomfort.

Often a caller makes the argument that the story he or she wants removed isn’t “important” and therefore we should have no qualms about wiping it from the record.

This is more prevalent as people engage in reputation management to help clean up their digital histories. The search engines send them to publishers and tell them it’s “just a couple lines of code” for us to make things disappear. Of course, for us, it’s also our integrity at stake.

Erasing the public record represented by a newspaper, whether in its print or online form, is no small thing. From our perspective, our traditional standards apply even in a new media world.

Our published content, whether it’s action taken by the Legislature or a Style Scout feature, is part of a historical record that shouldn’t be altered or erased. That’s part of our contract with readers. Removing published content can damage the trust our readers have in us and makes our online content far less reliable and trustworthy as a historical record.

Think about it: If you knew your neighbor had called us up and got us to take down a story from 10 years ago because he had said something that had come back to haunt him, would you have faith that our online record was in fact a record?

What if we learn that something in previously published content is wrong? We will always correct our errors. Our response will be to correct the mistake but attach an editor’s note that explains we’ve altered the story to correct an inaccuracy.

You’ll notice I’m not using line-in-the-sand language. We consider every case on its own merits. There could be a time when we decide for humanitarian reasons to remove content. If we do, we leave the story page up with an editor’s note explaining that the story was removed and why we did it. I imagine that happening incredibly rarely.

You may have noticed that we published items in print and online last week asking people to let us know what issues they want us to ask candidates about as the November election approaches. We’ve had a lot of response. There’s still time to give us your two cents’ worth. Email news@ljworld.com.