Check out the URL

Holy smokes. That gets you fired at my shoppe. Wonder if there were any casualties here.

 

It did not say that when it was published out. Someone sent it out like that on some other medium.

 

The URL ending is a field meant to improve SEO. What's actually there (put in by the author, usually) cannot be changed after publishing. That being said, anyone can replace that text with whatever they want (assuming what's inputted is a character that's URL-friendly) because what really matters is the asset ID (75936660). You can have two URL endings that are identical, filed to the same SSTS location on the same date and it not be an issue because the post will auto generate a unique asset ID.

 

And Matt explained it much more simply, and much better, than I could. Thank you.

 

So if anyone should be fired it should be a Gannett IT person or corporate manager who allowes URLs to be tinkered with by John Q. Public so that they still work as links as long as they keep the important bits.

 

About 15 years ago, some fellow editors and I sat in a half-day seminar with corporate lawyers who explained that even a derogatory story slug -- an internal thing, something that the public probably would never see -- can be grounds for libel. I cannot even imagine how much exposure you'd have with URLs that can be seen around the world and/or manipulated.

This is a bad thing.

 

I'm totally derailing and hijacking this thread but I noticed your profile pic and had to say this: I remember standing in the rain at a pay phone some 30 years ago sending in one of my very first high school football gamers with one of those Radio Shacks.

Those were the good old days, when technology began with a funky line of code at the start of your story, followed by a bunch of buzzing, hiccups and blips through a coupler. Talk about stone-age fun.

OK, back to the thread now.

 

A former joint canned a web producer for calling a guy a molester in the slug of a photo -- something you'd only see if you right-clicked on it and tried to save it to your hard drive (I'm guessing 0.1 percent of people do). You gotta be careful.