Program Directory

In online news, sto­ries live for­ev­er. The tip­sy pho­to­graph of you at the col­lege foot­ball game? It’s there. That news arti­cle about the polit­i­cal ral­ly you were march­ing at? It’s there. A charge for dri­ving under the influ­ence? That’s there, too. But what if… it wasn’t?

Sev­er­al years ago a group of jour­nal­ists in Cleve­land, Ohio, tried an exper­i­ment that had the poten­tial to turn things upside down: they start­ed unpub­lish­ing con­tent they’d already pub­lished. Pho­tographs, names, entire arti­cles. Every month or so, they met to decide what con­tent stayed, and what con­tent went. In this episode from 2019, Senior Cor­re­spon­dent Mol­ly Web­ster takes us inside the room where the edi­tors decid­ed who, or what, got to be delet­ed. And we talk about how the ​“right to be for­got­ten” has spread and grown in the years since. It’s a sto­ry about time and mem­o­ry, mis­takes and sec­ond chances, and soci­ety as we know it.