Death of the deadline

By David DesRoches

  

Image via digitalcitizen.ca

Getting beat by a competitor with a breaking news story is part of being a journalist. It toughens you, whittles you down to your sharpest point, and fills you with fire to not let it happen again. 

When it happens with other stories — ones that might have taken months or even years to develop — the result is embarrassment. Why didn’t I see that? We might think. 

Few would argue that speed is not a driving value in the modern newsroom. But how important is speed when it comes to publishing news? Should accuracy suffer on account of speed? 

Traditionally, news was deadline-driven and only television or radio could break news in real-time. With the net, anyone with a connection can break news as it happens. This has essentially eliminated the need for a deadline, as news stories are often posted as they are written, with edits and updates amended as necessary. At the very latest, a news story will go live the day after it is written. Any longer than that and you risk being scooped. 

Sure we might still write to a deadline, or have a target for finishing a story. But the fluid nature of online news allows for constant updates and amendments and corrections and even conversations through the comments. Is an online story ever truly finished?

So rather than drive ourselves to be accurate, the rising tendency is to get it first and fix it later if it's wrong.

Correcting a correction and the power/danger of unverified facts

 By David DesRoches

Publishing an unverified fact is an opportunity to challenge traditional notions of power as it relates to truth gatekeepers. It is not, however, an excuse for sloppy journalism.

The danger of publishing unverified information made headlines recently, after CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers published a story that claimed Mitt Romney’s former employer, Bain & Company, was a consultant during the auto company bailouts overseen by the Obama Administration.

The story was pulled after Bain’s PR president challenged the connection, claiming it was incorrect and demanding a retraction, to which CNBC promptly abided. But then it was learned that the report was correct, and that the correction was wrong, as Craig Silverman notes on Poynter.com. So Javers wrote another story, but not before the webomino effect ravaged the blogosphere, claiming CNBC didn’t operate by basic journalistic principles of fact verification.

Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik was one of the more outspoken critics, Silverman notes.  Even after the original story was proven correct, many remained convinced that CNBC's failure to properly verify the fact was its cardinal sin. 

Within the firestorm of criticism, there is an interesting dichotomy: What if Javers had contacted Bain & Company successfully before he wrote the first story, but the company lied to him about the connection, as they obviously did in their retaliation to his story?

Ethical Conundrum: How much is too much?

Saving Ethical Journalism —

Aggregation and curation have become a normal part of online news processes. It seems acceptable to take a certain amount of content from a source, as long as you attribute properly and provide outside links, so there's no confusion about where you got the story.

The question is, how much content can you take before you actually felt like you were violating the intellectual property rights of the original author? 10%... 20%... 50% or more? How much is too much and how much is okay?

This is a legal question (10% is the rule in Australia, but U.S. Copyright law does not define a word count or limit), but it is also a question of ethics, perhaps even morality. Credible aggregator Jim Romenesko got flak from Poynter's Julie Moos in November for not putting quotation marks around direct quotes, but Mr. Romenesko's attribution was clear.

But how much information is okay to take, with or without quotation marks? After the frivolous Righthaven lawsuits were exposed for what they are, it seems aggregation can be a Fair Use, but how do we define "fair"?

Is plagiarism becoming acceptible?

October of 2011 was the worst month since 2005 for plagiarism, according to Regret the Error's Craig Silverman.

Silverman wrote a post for Poynter.org where he reported nine cases of plagiarism in October. The second worst month was in March of 2008, according to Silverman.

What does this mean for modern journalism? Obviously people are still being reprimanded in some way, but some of these cases could even be considered copyright infringement. These reported cases are likely a small fraction of actual word theft.

Does this mean limited plagiarism is becoming acceptable, as long as the theft doesn't take away from the value of the original piece? Or does it mean that we are just not keen-eyed enough to catch all cases? Does any of this matter?

Let us know in the comments.