THE age of the internet has brought exciting opportunities for editors – but new moral dilemmas too.

Hardly a week goes by these days without someone getting in touch to either politely request, or angrily demand, that an online story about them is removed.

It usually involves people who have appeared in court and think it is unfair that details of their misdemeanours remain on the web after they have served their punishment.

Google searches on their names throw up newspaper articles revealing past convictions.

Employment prospects are undermined and relationships damaged.

Reports of crimes, and other personal embarrassments, have always been kept on record. Copies of every edition of The Northern Echo since 1870 are kept at Darlington Library, and the National Newspaper Library, in London, has archives of historic copies of papers from all over the country.

But the internet has added a new dimension.

It is an ever-growing monster which is much more easily accessible and searchable.

Last week, I received a call from a woman whose husband had been convicted of downloading extreme pornography and sexual images of children. She begged me to have the article removed from the internet, claiming her husband was mentally ill, although there had been no reference to that in court.

Finally, she warned: “If you don’t take it off, he’ll commit suicide.”

It is not the first time I’ve had someone say that to me in similar circumstances but it was impossible not to sympathise with her.

She’d had no knowledge of her husband’s activities, and she told me she had a child who would have to live with what her father had done for the rest of her life.

So what’s the answer? As hard as it is for innocent relatives, history cannot be erased.

Once it’s out there, it’s impossible to stop because information spreads like wildfire.

Where would the line be drawn? Wouldn’t everyone convicted of an offence expect to be spared indefinite internet shame?

When I explained this to the woman, as gently as I could, she called me “disgusting”

and put the phone down.

The reality is that such information cannot be removed from websites. It is very much part of the criminal justice system and it is to be hoped that the threat of more publicity than ever before acts as a deterrent.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t disturbed by my conversation with a wife and mother.

IN my last column, I apologised to the BBC for breaking an embargo on information about long-lost episodes of Doctor Who.

We came perilously close to digging an even bigger crater for ourselves last week when it was announced that The Clangers are returning to TV.

An over-excited news editor uploaded the story to our website and spotted an embargo seconds before it went live.

That really would have been dropping a clanger.

AS part of last week’s Headline Challenge with BBC Tees, I tweeted a story about a blind chicken called Chooky Wooky which had come back to life after “drowning” in a swimming pool, having three hours of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and being warmed up with a hair-dryer.

Our headline was: “Chicken coma”.

I was asked by a Twitter follower: “What kind of person gives a chicken CPR for three hours?”

Sorry, I simply can’t answer that.