Reading Radio Free Blogistan yesterday, I found out about Salon's retraction of an earlier Enron story. Per the letter explaining this move:

After careful review, Salon's editors have decided to take down from our Web site an article titled "Tom White played key role in covering up Enron losses" that we published on Aug. 29. We took this unusual step because we have come to the conclusion that we can no longer stand by the story in its entirety. Though we have corroborated most of the reporting in the article, some unanswered questions remain.

I understand Salon has absolute freedom to remove stories it can't stand by from their archives, but to this reader it does raise the question of what has changed since the article Scott Rosenberg wrote back in 1998 on major publications handling retractions on-line, where he compared the approaches of both Time and The New Republic. This was back when the whole Stephen Glass fiasco blew up on the Republic's face and they removed every article by Glass from their website, leaving only a letter explaining their reasons: "When we post something to our archive, it is being continuously published, and that implies ongoing endorsement of its honesty and truthfulness."

To quote Scott:

That sounds good, but it gives the magazine a convenient out, a chance to bury the embarrassing incident. There's no reason the magazine couldn't "continuously publish" the stories with an explicit statement that they're not honest and truthful. Time's approach is what the New Republic should have adopted: Leave the stories up, leave the historical record intact and append a note to readers (with appropriate links) explaining the subsequent history. With this method of dealing with errors, journalists can actually make the Web function better than print: After all, you don't find magazines going into the library stacks inserting notes of retraction into bound volumes.

Right now, the Enron story is linked to from the August, 2002 archives, probably also from many other pages. But it is all gone and there's not even the retraction letter on it's place. (Part of the original article is still in Google's cache.)

So, Scott, as I asked earlier, how is this different from those examples you mentioned back then, and will the links to the article be left to default to the ol' 404? No, I'm not looking to make Salon eat crow for this [how disingenuous! - id], it's a question born out of honest curiosity and concern for the historical record.