Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson has launched an online debate over how long newspapers should continue displaying old stories online.

Steve was recently contacted by a disgruntled reader asking him to remove a story from birminghammail.net which dated back over four years.

The man in question was a teacher who had been struck off the register by the General Teaching Council after being accused of swearing at a group of young people.

He told the Trinity Mirror editor that, if you typed his name into Google, the Mail's story would invariably come up in the search results and that it was having a very negative impact on his life.

Steve explained on his blog why he refused the request, saying that the original story was fair and accurate that there were no grounds for the paper to take the "unusual step" of deleting the story from its website.

However he then went on to ask readers of his blog what they thought of the rights and wrongs of the case, and whether it was different from the traditional archiving of newspaper files in libraries.

You can read the e-mail Steve received and his reply on his Editor's Chair blog.