Media

Appendix A Passes The Log It Was Appended To; The Stories Nobody Ran Outnumber The Ones They Corrected

917 logged corrections. 1,204 stories that never made air. The second number is the one nobody has disputed.

Appendix A opened on August 21 as a single tab in the back matter of the OOPS LOG, with no entries in it and no expectation that it would need many. It holds 1,204. The main log, which has been running since 2023 and counts other outlets' published corrections, stood at 917 as of Thursday, four in the afternoon. The appendix has been open thirteen days.

It is titled The Ones They Never Ran, and it does what the title says: it records stories that were reported, written, and killed. The obvious question is how a media reporter knows what was never published. Bob Callahan will not answer it. Every entry carries a three-character provenance code; the codes are defined in the finding aid; and the finding aid's key to the codes is not in the finding aid. The librarian has raised this twice.

Nobody Has Filed An Objection

The answer is duller than the withholding suggests, and the desk gives it here because the withholding is the only interesting part. The entries are self-reported. Reporters at other outlets send in their own killed stories, unprompted, and have been doing it since the table of contents ran. There is no leak, no source network and no document trove. There is an inbox.

That makes Appendix A the only section of the log that no outlet has contested. Twenty-two outlets are currently in dispute with the main log over eighty-one entries, several of them at length and one through counsel. Against the appendix, nothing has been filed, because filing against an entry requires conceding that the story existed, and an outlet that concedes the story existed has conceded the entry.

"The main log is a fight. This one is a confession box with a numbering series. I did not build it that way. It turned into that on the second day and I have not touched the design since." Bob Callahan

Indexed By Reason Given

The appendix has no index by outlet. It cannot have one: an outlet cannot be indexed for a story it does not concede exists, and the moment the index existed the appendix would become the main log, which already has an index by outlet and a lawyer attached to it. It is indexed instead by the reason given for killing the story, in the words of the person who gave it.

Timing is the largest category at 341. We Are Already On It holds 288, of which the log records twelve as subsequently on it. Legal holds 190 and is filed without comment, because Bob says he has no argument with Legal and never has. Not A Story holds 167, and the finding aid is careful here: the log makes no finding about whether it was a story. The log records that somebody said this.

Entry A-1 carries Bob Callahan's own byline. It is a story this publication killed in 2023, entered before the appendix had a name or a place to go, on the back of the legal pad the whole log started on. Asked what it was about, he said the entry records that it did not run and not what it said, and that this is the entire discipline. Asked why it is entry one, he said because it was.

The librarian returned Wednesday with the retention question in a new form: whether an entry can be removed if the story eventually runs. Bob said a story running does not un-kill it, and opened a subsection, Ran Later, which now holds 31 entries with a median delay of 214 days. She asked whether that was a retention schedule. He said it was a subsection. She wrote that down, which the desk notes is the first time in this arrangement that she has been the one taking notes.

Desk note: The main log stood at 917 as of Thursday, four in the afternoon. Bob asks that it be described as of Thursday, four in the afternoon. Appendix A is counted separately and, as of the same hour, is not included in that figure.