On the missing facts

I blogged yesterday about a SST story, which I thought was missing some key facts.

I did note in the post:

So people don’t blame the journalist, it is possible all this information was in the story they submitted, and sub-editors butchered it out. But regardless the end result is a story which doesn’t provide any details to back up the headlines.

Now the author has kindly e-mailed me, and it transpires that the couple of paragraphs which I said were missing support facts, were in fact from another story, and merged into that one online. The other story, was linked to from the main story.

While noting that this is not the responsibility of the author, I still regard it as less than satisfactory that the info from the other story was added in, in a way, which meant the story couldn’t be read by itself. But the author wanted it noted that the info wasn’t “made up” (I do not think I was implying it was incidentally), and that also the print edition had further graphs and data.

That’s fair enough. The point I was aiming to make is that an online story should be a complete story in itself.