Wings Over Scotland

One of the scary things about the decline in print newspaper sales is the mutability of online media. If you rely on digital versions of news stories for reference, it’s impossible to be sure that the paper you buy will be the paper you own tomorrow.

The most spectacularly ironic demonstration of the principle was when Amazon deleted copies of “1984” – a book whose central character spends his life doctoring and falsifying old newspapers for propaganda reasons – from customers’ Kindles without their knowledge a few years ago, showing that even content stored on your own device rather than on a publisher’s website wasn’t totally safe, and could be fiddled with or even taken away entirely, silently, from thousands of miles away.

But nowadays you can read three radically different versions of a story on a newspaper in a single day, all from clicking the same external link, with the whole process conducted in full public view, and almost nobody bats an eyelid.

Yesterday we highlighted a disturbing headline change to a Scotsman story about UK government cuts which ended up being portrayed as a possible consequence of independence. The article had started out with an accurate title, but was edited to become highly misleading and misrepresenative of its own content.

But within hours of our pointing it out, the piece had vanished altogether. Links to it redirected to a completely new story on the same subject by a different author. The original had led with a figure of £1bn for impending budget cuts, but the new headline was of one almost three times as large (£2.7bn), taken from later in the report.

The third version also removed the focus on the independence referendum, though it still appeared (for no justifiable reason) in the paper’s “Scottish independence” section. To all intents and purposes, the previous two versions never happened.

Luckily, we’re old hands when it comes to the Scotsman’s shenanigans, and we’d saved a copy of the original story (with the v2 headline) for just this sort of eventuality. But it never hurts to be reminded of the iron law of media-watching in the 21st century: don’t rely on links, don’t count on “the cloud”, and take copies of everything.

Goodness knows how many similar examples go unnoticed every day, and a site like this one can’t catch everything – which is why we also count on you, our readers, to be our eyes and ears. So if you see something important, whether it be a newspaper story or a blog or a tweet, don’t trust that it’ll still be there in an hour’s time – preserve it and be certain.

Most websites will let you save a copy of a page onto your own computer. In Firefox, for example, go to the top left of your screen and click on “File” and it’ll give you a “Save Page As…” option that’ll dump the web page onto your computer, safe from any subsequent covert alteration.

Alternatively, you can simply take a “photograph” of anything that appears on your computer screen. On the top row of most keyboards you’ll see a button marked “Print Screen” (or some abbreviated version like “Prt Scr”).

If you press that button, whatever’s on the screen will be copied to your computer’s “clipboard”. To save it permanently, you now need to turn it into an image file. On a Windows PC, click the Start button, click “All Programs” and find the “Accessories” folder. In there is an application called Paint.

Open Paint and press Ctrl and V on your keyboard (or press the big friendly “Paste” button found at the top left of newer versions of Paint). That’ll dump the image into the application, from where you can save it as a normal JPEG file you can email to us.

Print Screen works for ANYTHING that’s on your computer screen. It’ll save absolutely everything that’s visible, but don’t worry about cropping off all the extra stuff – we can deal with all that at our end.

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad, it’s even simpler. Press the Home button (the big round one) and the power button (the one on the top of the device) at the same time and you’ll hear a camera-shutter sound. Now whatever was on your screen is automatically saved as a picture in your Camera Roll, which can be emailed or tweeted at the touch of a button.

A vast proportion of PC owners haven’t a clue what the Print Screen button does, and a lot of iThing owners have no idea they can take screenshots, but between them these functions have exposed more scandals than the Queen’s had hot dinners.

They’re absolutely vital tools in keeping a handle on the truth, whether it’s on newspaper sites, blogs, Facebook pages or Twitter accounts, because anything that’s stored on a hard drive or server you don’t own might not be there in a minute’s time.

The price of truth is eternal vigilance, folks. Keep ’em peeled.