Investigative journalists follow the cache

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 November 2007 at 11:19
Tags: Blogs, Google, RSS, Sunday Herald

Sunday Herald Scottish political editor Paul Hutcheon has an interesting story this week about critical comments that Scottish Labour’s new spin doctor, made on his colleagues on a blog.

“Gavin Yates used his blog to describe Wendy Alexander as ‘abrasive’, labelled shadow health minister Andy Kerr as ’simply uninspiring’, and blasted Jack McConnell for being a ‘lame duck leader’ when in office,” Hutcheon reported.

As Scottish blogger Duncan “Doctor Vee” Stephen points out, the interesting this about this story is how Hutcheon got hold of the embarrassing old blog posts:

His comments featured on his WordPress-hosted blog, GYmedia. A message on the blog page now states: “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available.”

But the Sunday Herald has uncovered a number of Yates’s postings, many of which portray the Labour leadership in a negative light.

Just how the Sunday Herald obtained the deleted posts is not spelled out, but there are several possibilities. The most obvious is that they accessed the old posts via the Google cache.

One Yates blog quote cited by Hutcheon, about Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander, was certainly easy enough to find using this method.

Duncan Stephen suggests several other possible techniques, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (which also produces an occasional cache of material on the web) or using RSS readers to create local archives of blog posts:

If you use a desktop-based RSS reader the files will actually be on your computer. But I use Google Reader, and I have access to every single blog post written by Gavin Yates since the 29th of May 2007.

Stephen also points out that in light of all this, there is little point in attempting to undo what has already been published online:

It is the fact that Gavin Yates felt the need to delete his blog that makes it the story. It has become the forbidden fruit. But in this day and age, once you publish something on the web, there is no going back. I alone have access to 48 of his posts, just by making a few clicks in Google Reader. By deleting his blog, Gavin Yates has created a lot of interest in what he wrote — and access to it is by no means impossible.

Sounds about right…