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.

Aggregation tests traditional notions of sourcing and accountability

 By David DesRoches

 “A thousand bloggers all talking to each other doesn’t get you a report from a war zone. Somebody’s got to take a real risk... [and] gather that news originally.”

- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales,

in Page One documentary

Media blogger Jim Romenesko gained a Twitter following of more than 45,000 people (and growing) by being a maverick paraphraser — a sensei in the art of finding interesting news and distilling it to its essence. His success germinated while working at the Poynter Institute where he helped pioneer an aggregation style that now permeates the web. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of hits to other websites, giving them free advertising through his enticing summaries.

           

In late 2011, Romenesko’s aggregation techniques became the subject of hot debate and derision when his boss, Julie Moos, posted a blog that challenged his practices and claimed his attributions were incomplete. She provided examples where Romenesko failed to include quotation marks around certain phrases within his aggregated story.