The Mirror

WaPo Recycling Week-Old Content For Print’s FRONT PAGE, Covering Tracks Online

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

Betsy Rothstein Gossip blogger
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Up until now, Politico has been the king of fuzzy math, backdating its stories so they appeared to break sooner than they did.

But The Washington Post has some explaining to do.

On Wednesday, Washington D.C.’s premier newspaper ran an above the fold story about Brexit on its front page.

But strangely, the story’s URL shows that it was actually published on August 23.

Further perplexing is that when you Google the story, the time stamp is also August 23.

Yet when you click on a link of the story, it is dated August 29.

The Mirror is no IT expert. But talking to people who understand these wonky issues, it would appear that The Washington Post is reusing digital content a week later on the front page of their paid-subscriber paper — which is not a great practice — then changing digital publish dates to make it appear less egregious to people searching it out.

And they’re doing it pretty sloppily at that.

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

An email to a WaPo publicist went unreturned.

But, dear readers, judge for yourself:

The front page:

WaPoStoryBrexit

The URL:

Screen Shot 2016-08-31 at 1.56.18 PM

A Google search:

Screen Shot 2016-08-31 at 1.57.06 PM

A link:

Screen Shot 2016-08-31 at 1.55.55 PM

UPDATE: A WaPo spokeswoman replied, “The post was inadvertently published on Aug 23rd. It was taken down and replaced by an editor’s note. The story officially published on Aug. 29th.”