Radiolab - Right to be Forgotten

In an online world, that story about you lives forever. The tipsy photograph of you at the college football game? It’s up there. That news article about the political rally you were marching at? It’s up there. A DUI? That’s there, too. But what if ... it wasn’t. In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of journalists are trying out an experiment that has the potential to turn things upside down: they are unpublishing content they’ve already published. Photographs, names, entire articles. Every month or so, they get together to decide what content stays, and what content goes. On today’s episode, reporter Molly Webster goes inside the room where the decisions are being made, listening case-by-case as editors decide who, or what, gets to be deleted. It’s a story about time and memory; mistakes and second chances; and society as we know it. This episode was reported by Molly Webster, and produced by Molly Webster and Bethel Habte. Special thanks to Kathy English, David Erdos, Ed Haber, Brewster Kahle, Imani Leonard, Ruth Samuel, James Bennett II, Alice Wilder, Alex Overington, Jane Kamensky and all the people who helped shape this story. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. To learn more about Cleveland.com’s “right to be forgotten experiment,” check out the very first column Molly read about the project.

Duration: 48m
Broadcast on: 23 Aug 2019
Audio Format: other

In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of journalists are trying out an experiment that has the potential to turn things upside down: they are unpublishing content they’ve already published. Photographs, names, entire articles. Every month or so, they get together to decide what content stays, and what content goes. On today’s episode, reporter Molly Webster goes inside the room where the decisions are being made, listening case-by-case as editors decide who, or what, gets to be deleted. It’s a story about time and memory; mistakes and second chances; and society as we know it.

This episode was reported by Molly Webster, and produced by Molly Webster and Bethel Habte.

Special thanks to Kathy English, David Erdos, Ed Haber, Brewster Kahle, Imani Leonard, Ruth Samuel, James Bennett II, Alice Wilder, Alex Overington, Jane Kamensky and all the people who helped shape this story.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

To learn more about Cleveland.com’s “right to be forgotten experiment,” check out the very first column Molly read about the project.

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RIDILEB is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. All right, here's a good one. This is a guy whose murder conviction overturned, but he shot and killed somebody. I mean, this is violence, right? It ends up not being a crime, but he took somebody's life with a gun. This position is ... Hey, I'm Chad Abunrod, this is RadioLab, and we're going to start off today with a conversation that happened in a conference room somewhere in Ohio. Let's see. Maybe just how I got to Cleveland. Yes. Let me walk us through that point. Comes to us from our reporter, Molly Webster. So it was like September. We were looking around for stories for something. One of our challenges, like bears or bad news breaking things, and so I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but I'm from Ohio. Really? Yeah, I know it's shocking. And so I thought, oh, I'll do ... I'll pull the Ohio card right now. I'm going to look at this online news site, cleveland.com, but there's nothing in the story that is like harm ... I mean, yes, it says he shot someone, but he did shoot someone. I think I saw a headline on their homepage about the right to be forgotten. So the information about the case is preserved. It's just when you search his name, it doesn't come up. Wait time out. This is a room full of people trying to figure out if someone has the right to be forgotten. I didn't actually know, so I just emailed the guy ... Hello. Hello who had written about the experiment. This is Chris. Chris Quinn. I am the editor of cleveland.com. He's basically the head honcho. I started at the Plain Dealer in 1996 as a reporter. So Chris's story is he started out at the print newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and he was a reporter. He did that for about five years, and he moved on to become an editor. And then in 2013, they created an entirely new newsroom that they asked me to lead. He basically became the editor-in-chief of their online paper, cleveland.com. And what we really were trying to do was figure out what kind of content does the digital audience want. Once he moved online, the audience was different, the format was different, the speed which they had to put up stories was different.

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