We live in a confusing time for the newspaper business. Too many years ago to count, we broke stories at around midnight when the presses began to roll — or even noon when newspapers like the Times-News were afternoon publications.
Seems like a quaint idea today — afternoon newspapers, freshly produced for the lunch crowd — or for dad to read when he got home from work to pass the time before Huntley-Brinkley or Walter Cronkite came on TV.
We basically had to relearn our livelihood a few years ago when newspapers started posting stories online to their websites. The idea then was it had to go out immediately, it not sooner, to stay ahead or even with our competition from websites operated by TV stations or other newspapers. The news was posted pretty fast, but a story still had to be written. It took time, it sometimes wasn’t up to print quality, but we were told that was OK. “Good enough,” because the phrase of the day.
And so we did.
Today things move even faster. The emergence of Twitter and Facebook as quick-fire news sources is undeniable. Now we post — in fewer than 140 characters via Twitter — whatever we think we know about a news event in the moment it’s happening. Reporters do so from wherever they are by smart phone. Editors do the same. We print what we see and hear with accompanying typos. The details come later when a story is finally posted online.
Sometimes these Twitter or Facebook posts aren’t up to online quality. It’s a world of multiple standards depending on what platform you’re perched upon in the moment. There is the Print Standard, the Web Standard and the Twitter Standard.
The Twitter Standard hopefully can’t get much lower than it did over the weekend when speed overwhelmed common sense and years of journalism training.
As many know, a number of media outlets killed former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno hours before he actually passed away from complications stemming from treatment for lung cancer. It happened because a college student made a rookie mistake. It became a major problem because people paid to know better did something even worse, they acted without thinking and compounded a rookie’s regrettable error.
Poynter, a media teaching and support organization traced the original post about Paterno’s death to Onward State, a student online publication at the university. Poynter traces a fascinating group of Twitter posts Saturday night concerning the original erroneous report of Paterno’s death and the family’s fairly rapid response debunking it. Paterno passed away Sunday morning.
The student editor of Onward State immediately resigned. It was a mistake, and a bad one traced to a bogus email sent to Penn State students. The failure was in checking other sources. When you pronounce someone dead, the rule is to be damn sure. There is nothing new about this rule. It’s almost as old as journalism itself.
But like I said, it was a rookie mistake and one that would’ve been a campus issue were it not for Twitter and some erroneous calls at very high levels of national media. CBS Sports, for example, was among the first to retweet the information without checking or sourcing it. Others followed like mindless dominos tumbling one after another. Among the victims: The Huffington Post, Slate, Howard Kurtz and Poynter itself.
Note, the Associated Press didn’t fall down with the others but was among the first to post information from the Paterno family that the death story was false. The AP should be applauded for sticking to its standards rather than worrying about the rush to be first.
The Paterno gaffe is the most recent and serious of warning shots about the urgency and fallacy of Twitter reporting. Newspapers and other media outlets can’t be too careful.
An example occurred locally the previous weekend.
On Jan. 14 a reader contacted one of our reporters via Twitter with news item. That was a first. Often we mine social media for things we turn into stories. This time, someone Roselee Papandrea follows sent her a direct note asking why police were working the train tracks in the Glen Raven area. Roselee sent a text to Molly McGowan who was our reporter on duty. Molly arrived on the scene so quickly even the police were a little surprised.
From there, though, the social media landscape grew a bit murky, something that illustrates what a minefield it can be. A couple of people on Facebook theorized that the victims in the train incident were Elon students. One of the university’s student news outlets, Phoenix14, tweeted as much. An Elon student who knows me sent a question my way late Saturday night wondering if I could confirm that the people killed by the train were Elon students. I responded that police did not say that and we would not speculate about it. Moments later, Phoenix14 tweeted that their initial report might not be accurate.
Turned out, the victims weren’t Elon students at all.
The lessons for us all are these: In this day and age, accuracy has never been more important.
And don’t believe everything you see on Twitter.
That’s so ten seconds ago!
Ha! Very true. But the overall message is still timeless.
Madison, you couldn’t be more on-point with this post. It’s not the technology nor the times we live in that let us down. It’s ourselves when we don’t follow sound principles and judgment. It’s just so darn easy to hit that tweet or retweet button. The only thing worse than the mistake — in this particular case — would be not learning anything from it.
Thanks John. It is too easy to hit the retweet button — especially when you see a brand like CBS is making the posts. I think we both understand how it happens. And you’re right, we all need to learn from it.
Accurate or inaccurate, I suspect a new day and age of tweety bird reporting has been ‘hatched’ and there is no turning back now.
I agree with the article. Well we can’t turn back time. Whether it brings bad or good result, for sure, many would be disappointed if you’ll have it down. We must embrace what we have right now and accept what we will have for tomorrow.