What happened? Why did the first version seem so off and why wasn’t The Times more transparent about the changes?

I asked Carolyn Ryan, The Times’s political editor, for an explanation. “Trump acted jarringly differently in Phoenix than he did in Mexico, and we scrambled to reflect that, without obscuring the fact that he was backing away from his policy to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants,” she said. “I think readers were eager to see the fiery language and belligerent tone in Phoenix reflected quickly in the story, especially if they had just watched his appearance, and I understand that.”

What that boils down to is: We were moving as fast as we could and the story changed on us.

The flaw in hanging this simply on tight deadlines and fast-changing facts is that many other major news sites managed to hit the mark.

Politico was up not long after the Times article with a piece that said Trump squashed any speculation that he might soften on immigration, “delivering a hawkish, hardline, and true-to-his-roots border platform and vowing that on Day One of his administration, the United States would launch a mammoth deportation program and begin construction of a wall.”

The Washington Post, also posting around the same time, had updated its article to say that hours after leaving Mexico Trump returned to his aggressive tenor on immigration, yelling at the crowd in Arizona and promising to subject illegals to deportation.

The Arizona Republic was up with a similar piece.

Ryan maintains that The Times was on the news too. She said that there has been too much focus on this single piece. Her team, she said, primarily relies on both live discussions and concise briefings on breaking news, and indeed these features dominated the homepage Wednesday night.

“We aggressively update our coverage, minute by minute, through our live chat, which highlights and analyzes political events as they unfold, and our live briefing, which tells readers what they have missed,” she said. “Both are enormously popular with readers, and they have given us a flexible platform to drive real-time coverage in politics.”