Comments on: It’s not Twitter — this is just the way the news works now

By: Elvin Luku

Elvin Luku — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:58:12 +0000

For the first part, it’s not true that “this is simply the way news works now”. Media is the news (McLuahn), that means, the same news it’s trasmitted in different ways from different kind of medias. The rest it’s ok

By: Sean Morris

Sean Morris — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:34:32 +0000

This is a very insightful piece, but the perpetual inaccuracies perpetrated by click-happy twitizens cannot be justified. Reams of regurgitated information, right or wrong, plagues social media. Real Journalism, regardless of accuracy, costs money — it takes feet on the ground, face-to-face interviews, hounding phone calls, direct human interaction. As a journalist, I’m not allowed to disguise other writers’ reporting as my own, that would be plagiarism. The kerfuffle on social media surrounding the last two major national tragedies was not a stream of “real-time information,” it was a frantic postmodern hive mind.

By: Drew Clark

Drew Clark — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:09:25 +0000

Agree it’s not Twitter’s fault…it’s Twitter’s users that many times are at fault for creating or passing along non-factual or misleading information. Is it not the responsibility of all of us to first verify facts before shouting them out to potentially millions of recipients who might make decisions based on what they see? I guess it’s also clear that on the receiving end of a Tweet we need to take what we see with a pound of salt, that the veracity of many such messages has not been checked. At least with the old, slow traditional media some level of fact-checking took place prior to sending out on the AP wire or publishing in print. Ditto for pre-cable TV news. But the fact that CNN and others in their race to “get it first” don’t practice proper fact-checking shouldn’t lower the bar for others, including Twitter users.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:29:27 +0000

Great points,Tim. Thanks for the comment.

By: AfonsoDuartePimenta

AfonsoDuartePimenta — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:23:07 +0000

“On top of that, the two have become so intertwined that much of the news (both accurate and inaccurate) about the shootings that appeared on television likely started on Twitter or Facebook.”
Then: another reason to use it less if contaminates REAL newsrooms and REAL journalists

By: AfonsoDuartePimenta

AfonsoDuartePimenta — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:20:59 +0000

“On top of that, the two have become so intertwined that much of the news (both accurate and inaccurate) about the shootings that appeared on television likely started on Twitter or Facebook.”
Then: here is another reason to give less credit to it if contaminates REAL journalism

By: Julian Sims

Julian Sims — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:51:38 +0000

Hopefully those who falsely identify innocent people as ‘perpetrators’ of crimes will think twice following the civil cases successfully brought by McAlpine – and those who claim that such acts are just a ‘price’ of ‘real-time flows’ will see that the real price is a hefty payment of damages. Probability reporting will hopefully be accompanied by probability of successful litigation! The best way to ensure that the professional media act professionally is for greater access to the law for innocent people slandered by shoddy reporting

By: Tim Schreier

Tim Schreier — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:42:49 +0000

I use Twitter and to some extent Facebook as an “Alert System”. It can offer a quick heads up to things that may catch my interest but then I go and do further investigation. The best analogy I can think of is walking down a street and you hear someone tell you there is a fire on the next block, you then go to do some investigative work on your own. If people rely on tweets for the entire story, they are going to be sadly disappointed. You get alerted but then take it to the next step.
Tim Schreier New York, NY

By: DC

DC — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 20:05:04 +0000

for ‘oldnewspaperman’

Amen…

This is a perfect example of why I made an immediate career change, after I got my degree in Journalism . What saddens me, is that the youngest generations will never know the truth and value of real news reporting.
Our planet has become dependent on technology and social media for everything, including news, and most people probably don’t even care what the truths are, but yet everyone has an opinion. Twitter is an overinflated “soapbox”, and now it appears, everyone gets to have their moment……

By: Joe Sanchez

Joe Sanchez — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:11:25 +0000

What does it mean to correct errors in “real time?” How do we see **and know** what “errors [are] happening in real time?” So far, it appears that the people who are first correcting these news errors are the ones being **incorrectly** identified as the perpetrators of these crimes.

A news error, once reported, is going to be disseminated very quickly given the proliferation of social media today. There is no “correction of errors in real time;” that’s a sound bite that has no practical meaning.

Go back to the timeline of the Connecticut school shootings. It took *hours* before news report errors were *fully* corrected. In some cases, the errors went thru various iterations before the actual facts were reported.

Take the case of the shooter’s mother. At first it was reported that she was a teacher and was killed at the school. Then there were reports that she was not a full-time teacher but only a part-time teacher. Then it was reported that the shooter’s brother had been found dead at home. Then it was correctly reported that the mother was the one found dead at her home and later, correctly reported that she was not a teacher at the school.

As another example, major news media that heard the shooter’s name, in their eagerness to be “the first to report,” looked on Facebook for a name and locale match and reported that person to be the shooter. It turns out they were wrong, just as the news media were wrong in initially reporting who the shooter was in the “Batman” movie theater shootings. Furthermore, in this case, it turns out that authorities and the media got the name of the Connecticut shooter wrong and some hours passed before that was corrected.

People (non-news professionals who communicate news and information via social media) should understand and practice the basic tenets of professional news reporting. For starters, this means realizing that the first information coming from incidents like these may be incorrect.

People should be skeptical about passing along information such as names in the first minutes and hours after incidents like these. There is no substitution for practicing the principles of professional news reporting; one doesn’t have to be a professional news reporter to understand what these are.

The “new normal” should not be about passing along information without critically thinking what the ramifications could be if that information turns out to be incorrect. We have a fundamental responsibility as citizens to understand what we choose to communicate.