For years, mostly in talks at conferences, I’ve been suggesting that when news organizations cover breaking news stories, reporters and editors post updates with
categories such as "what we know" and "what we don’t know at this time." Dan Gillmor expressed support for such a new media convention when we chatted about breaking news a couple of months ago.
So here’s an interesting letter in the Sunday New York Times:
News in the Internet Age
“Breaking News: Can Times Quality Be Preserved Online?” (Nov. 19) appears to be a lot of hand-wringing over an easily solved problem.
Why
doesn’t The Times set up a special section online, perhaps called “New
York Times Online Raw” to present breaking news that has not yet been
formalized for the print edition? Provide a link to these stories on
the Times home page, with a disclaimer at the top of the “Raw” page
explaining that the stories are breaking news and have not yet been
thoroughly fact-checked and edited.The stories themselves in
this separate section would be written in a different manner from those
meant for the print edition. There could be a subsection titled “What
is Known,” which would include everything that has been verified. A
second subsection, entitled “What Is Surmised,” would contain the
information that The Times doesn’t want to get scooped on but at the
same time has not been able to verify.This approach could also
serve as a model for other news organizations that are ever more
blurring the distinction between fact and less-than-fact (to be
generous) in their reporting.John Mocenigo
Califon, N.J.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
I’m all for access to fast breaking information, however, I think there needs to be a greater effort to ensure the gullible public no longer assumes that it must be true if it is in black and white, even if that is on a monitor. There is great potential for damage to personal reputations if some overzealous wannabe reporter posts something before verifying and having his / her material vetted by an editor.
I am puzzled. You seem to be approving of the NYT letter but in 2002 you wrote in the Online Journalism Review: “But the underlying ethical considerations of journalism transcend the medium. In other words, journalism demands high standards, no matter the medium.
For online journalism today, the ethical bottom line is this: I don’t know of a single online news publication that believes a story unfit for print is fair game for the Web.”
Have you changed your mind?
Interesting that you’d cite that long-ago article. It’s somewhat related, but I was really talking about something else back then – the printing of rumor and gossip. I think a breaking news story in the online medium is a different animal. Rather than withhold information that a newsroom obtains but can’t immediately verify, it would be a service to provide the information but in the proper context, saying here’s what we’ve been able to verify, here’s what we’ve heard but can’t yet verify, and here is what others are reporting. I think it goes to the immediacy of the medium, so it’s really not about lowering standards.