Stories can change. Old versions should not vanish.

PressTrace saves every public version of a news article as it changes after publication. When an editor rewrites a headline or reworks the body, the new version is kept beside the old ones with its capture time. The old version stays visible, so you can see what a story said when it first went live and what it says now, side by side.

The idea comes from a book by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. Lipstadt went back through what American newspapers actually printed at the time and set it against what was really happening in Europe. The reporting was there, but it was often buried, hedged, or worded so that readers could look away. The record of what was published is its own kind of evidence.

You can watch the same thing happen now. The article above is from the LA Times on the night of the 2024 UCLA protests. The first headline framed the students at the encampment as the problem. A few hours later the headline named the counterprotesters who attacked the camp. By morning the wording had softened into a passive violent night, with no subject and no one doing the attacking. It was the same night and the same paper, but the record looked different depending on when you happened to read it.

The point is not to punish correction. A story should be able to fix itself. It should not be able to change shape while the old version quietly disappears. PressTrace links you to the source, shows the versions, and leaves the judgment to you.

This particular example was surfaced by HasanAbi in his LA Times Headline Change clip. Every version shown here is verifiable on the Internet Archive linked above.