Craig Silverman of the
Poynter Institute compared NewsDiffs to
ProPublica's
ChangeTracker, a tool that records revisions to the
White House website and the
Sunlight Foundation's
Politwoops, a tool that displays tweets deleted by Twitter accounts owned by politicians. Lauren Rabaino, a homepage producer at
The Seattle Times praised NewsDiffs in
Adweek, writing that it "solves a fundamental problem with the minute-by-minute news cycle — changes are happening constantly and subtly with no form of documentation for those change".
Arthur S. Brisbane, the
public editor of
The New York Times, wrote that around June 2011, "the newsroom's management told me that establishing a stronger historical record by tracking changes in articles and keeping them in a comprehensive archive was not a priority" and noted that with the creation of NewsDiffs in June 2012, "It's as if The Times is being turned inside out, its inner workings exposed for all to see — a kind of forced transparency."
Salon co-founder
Scott Rosenberg said that NewsDiffs and similar tools can imply that journalists are concealing major revisions to their articles. Eric Price agreed, noting that many articles have a "gotcha tone", for example when authors discuss how
The New York Times made a substantive revision without publishing a correction. Researchers John Fass and Angus Main wrote in the journal
Digital Journalism that a "limitation of Newsdiffs is that it contains no contextualising information". Brisbane wrote that "browsing the robo-stream of Times articles is labor intensive". Kira Goldenberg of the
Columbia Journalism Review shared the same view, writing that, "there's no way to tell if tracked changes will be significant without browsing through the exhaustive list." She said that was a "shame" because when NewsDiffs stores "significant changes that aren't noted as corrections",
The New York Times can be found failing to follow its own guidelines. She also wrote that the "site attracted coverage when it first went live, but it continues to serve as a unique source for media analysis in an era when journalists can revise copy with a click." ==References==