PressTrace

Newspapers change articles after publication.

Sometimes to fix errors. Sometimes to quietly retract a claim once the original went viral. PressTrace keeps the receipts — here it is working on real Internet Archive snapshots.

PressTrace

We keep every version.

A news story does not stop changing once it is published. Headlines get quietly rewritten, sometimes for hours. PressTrace captures every version as it goes live, so the record cannot be edited out from under you. Here is one article, one night, as its headline changed.

Every version above is a real snapshot from the Internet Archive.

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Why this exists, in words

PressTrace saves every version of a news article as it changes after publication. Each time an editor rewrites a headline or reworks the body, we capture the new version and keep it next to the old ones, with the time of each capture. Nothing gets overwritten. 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 back into a passive violent night, with no subject and no one doing the attacking. Same night, same paper, three very different stories depending on when you happened to read it.

The point is to keep a record that cannot be quietly rewritten, so that reporting can be checked against itself and against what actually happened. This is how Argand works in general. We keep the receipts and we link you to the source. We do not rewrite the source and we do not tell you what to think about it.

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.