Re: Citizen journalism and the fake Steve Jobs heart attack
Dan Thornton | October 4, 2008I was going to make two points regarding the discussion of Citizen Journalism in the wake of the fake article posted on CNN’s iReport ‘Unedited. Unfiltered. News.’ The article falsely claimed Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, and had a big effect on Apple share prices.
Tim Windsor beat me to one of my points, pointing out that the blame for this should lay more with CNN than citizen journalism in general. Many people seem to have ignored the fact that one bad article on one implementation of Citizen Journalism, does not mean the concept as a whole is flawed - even on the CNN site there’s going to be a good ratio of interesting, factual stories to the fake ones, let alone taking every instance of Citizen Journalism across the internet. After all, how many newspapers have ended up in court because of errors or false articles and images? Did that end print journalism?
My second point is around fact checking and reprinting and responding to articles. Increasingly we all get our news from a huge variety of sources, both mainstream and individual-generated. This means that as receivers, we need to be more proactive in judging all our inputs. Particulary if, as bloggers and content producers ourselves, we intend to republish and share that information. In a world where everyone is a potential news source for their friends and contacts, it’s damaging to our own individual reputations to spread something which is old and out-of-date, irrelevant to our contacts/friends/audience, or simply false.
It’ll take time, and better tools, but increasingly people will be looking for more ways to verify information. When I see breaking news on Twitter or Facebook etc I check it against mainstream news via Google News etc. When I read mainstream or non-mainstream websites and blogs, or microblogging etc, I measure it against what I know about the sorurce, whether it’s a friend who might have discovered exclusive news, or an organisation I know has generally been reliable. And that’s just basic fact checking.
After all, Reader Reception Theory has been around since the 1960s, meaning that the understanding of a text is shaped by the interpretation of a reader based on their own experiences and culture. Journalists have always been trained and told to question everything and check all the facts. And there have been enough cases where rumours and fictitious articles have been well publicised.
On the plus side, the debate around Citizen Journalism has not only reminded me of a planned blog post which never saw the light of day, but also helped further ideas for a couple of applications I’ve been thinking about. And Steve Jobs is OK, which is good!
Dan, I disagree about CNN being to blame. You're right
Sam Shepherd | October 4, 2008Dan, I disagree about CNN being to blame.
You’re right when you say
the two legal options seem to be to moderate everything, or go for plausible deniability and never look at anything until someone brings it to your attention.
For a news organisation to avoid ending up in court over comments on its stories or citizen journalism sites, these ARE the only legal options. There’s no half and half.
Moderating is time consuming in the extreme (even on a small regional paper that’s a full time job) and also requires 24 hour staffing (or disabling the facility overnight).
Some places I’ve worked don’t allow comments on 50 per cent of their stories because of concern about what people will say.
We have two choices: trust the citizen journalist to act responsibly (and therefore choose not to police them unless made aware of a problem). Offten other posters will correct and castigise for you.
Or: moderate everything. In the current economic climate, who’s going to pay for that? And doesn’t it go against the whole idea of iReport and citizen journalism?
CNN makes it very clear. iReport is unedited and unfiltered. It’s their tagline.
Making it CNN’s responsibilty to check everything posted is more likely to make them wash their hands of the whole project.
Surely the blame lies with the people who repeated it without checking?
Thanks for the comment. Perhaps the answer is to crowdsource
Dan Thornton | October 4, 2008Thanks for the comment. Perhaps the answer is to crowdsource the responsibility for citizen journalists to only upload verified stories by building in reputation mechanisms, and reward structures?