When you hear “right to be forgotten,” you may think of the European Union, where right-to-be-forgotten regulations allow nearly anyone to ask Google to take down search results they don’t like. The result is a clash between free speech, the public’s right to know, and privacy. Must everything be preserved on the internet forever? If you commit a minor, dumb crime when you’re young, is it fair for articles about that crime to pop to the top of the Google results when a prospective employer searches your name for the rest of your life? The old newspaper standard is: Never change anything that’s true; news values come first. In 2018, it’s clear that standard isn’t exactly working; a brief item on Page A17 in one day’s print newspaper doesn’t have the same sort of impact as a permanent digital record, reports Nieman Lab. Chris Quinn, the editor and president of Cleveland.com/Advance Ohio, is an example of a journalist who is not an absolutist. “It really comes down to: How long does somebody have to pay for a mistake?” said Quinn, who has worked in newsrooms for over 40 years. He’s leading the charge to make newsrooms more compassionate through a unique take on the concept of the right to be forgotten.
Quinn has changed Cleveland.com’s policy of automatically using mugshots (“the worst photos people will ever take”) with minor crime stories. It no longer names perpetrators of minor crimes. Cleveland.com is also launching an effort to review individual’s requests to remove their names from old stories. (Similar efforts have taken place at outlets like the New Haven Independent.) It’s a process that starts from a place of compassion, abandons the idea of doing things just because they’ve always been done that way, and injects nuance throughout a newspaper’s editorial decisions.