Back in the day, my students and I studied journalists and how they handled their notes in a way that would protect them. We got two distinct responses.

One school of thought was that it would be good to have all notes and audio and video to show who said what. The idea was that if they had questions in the writing of the article, they could refer to their records. They would have something stronger than pure memory to back up their ideas. And if they were forced to by a court of law, they could point to something with solid evidentiary value.

On the opposite side was another school—the idea that journalists should dump their notes, audio and video. The concept was that if they didn’t have the notes, they wouldn’t have to bring this up and make them available in a court where the notes could be parsed and misinterpreted.

Back then, we sort of leaned towards having the documents but using every legal protection to protect sources and what-not. That seemed then to be more of the professional ethos. When we attended professional conferences with the big professional newspapers, they used their lawyers to access documents and to pursue information aggressively; theirs was not a defensive stance.

User-Posted Information

This issue came up in the line of instructional design with the maintaining of user-posted information to a site. The questions: How long should one hold information before it goes “bad”? When does holding information for a long time become a kind of legal risk?

The “legal” word on this street seems to be to not keep anything for over a month, at least as part of the Terms of Service. What this means will have to be parsed by the development team to know the best way to actualize the policy.