Friday, May 08, 2009
Wiki-user to Journalists: "PWN'D"
From the Agence France Presse:DUBLIN (AFP) - An Irish student's fake quote on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia has been used in newspaper obituaries around the world, the Irish Times reported.Now.... I don't know about you, but I kinda got the whole "don't-trust-Wikipedia" meme when I was just a lowly student in journalism, oh so many years ago. I always thought everyone knew, "Don't use Wikipedia!"
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died in March.
Shane Fitzgerald, 22, a final-year student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin, told the newspaper he placed the quote on the website as an experiment when doing research on globalisation.
Guess not.
What's more troubling is how this reflects on our already shaky industry. "Not good" are two words that come to mind. This tech blog summed it up another way:
A key part of the argument for maintaining traditional journalism is that its trained reporters can perform research and investigations that the untrained masses can't, and the content they produce is run by editors and fact-checkers. The revelation that their research is often no more sophisticated than an average Web surfer's, and that the fact checking can be nonexistent, really doesn't help that argument much."Doesn't help that argument much"? Heck, it almost shoots it into the ground. Corrections be damned, we're supposed to get it right. And I can't help but wonder how an unchecked wiki quote could make it past the copy desk and into print. Was it a lowly intern obit writer who didn't know better? A seasoned obit writer who, regretfully, isn't as seasoned in technology? Or just another reporter who felt no need to stay at work late to check his facts?
Being that the quote showed up in more than one place, I suppose it's anyone's guess.
But I know one thing for sure -- thank God for Kee Malesky, the veteran NPR librarian who has no qualms about shouting from the top of the building...
Labels: deep doo-doo
continue...Friday, October 19, 2007
A quick note
I'm exhausted. Physically and Mentally.After a whirlwind weeklong celebration of my 24th year of life last week, I got thrust into this trial on Monday.
I walked into the office and my boss calls me into the office and tells me to haul tail to the Kent County Courthouse for jury selection. See, in addition to covering the town of West Warwick, I also cover county courts for my bureau. I was a little upset that I hadn't know this was coming down the pipeline, but I headed down to the courthouse and sat through two days of jury selection.
I've been covering the trial ever since. At each break and recess, I call the Web team at the paper and give them an update. After court wraps for the day, I head to the office (or file remotely if I can) and write up about 18 inches for the next day's paper. Yesterday, I crafted this tale based on the testimony of one witness.
Besides sitting on those hard wooden court benches all day, the case is just kind of trying. I have a heart, so to think that someone could hurt an innocent child like this is really upsetting. I haven't been getting a lot of sleep -- not necessarily because of this alone -- so that's been making things rough as well.
Today, I'm writing for tomorrow and after listening to testimony, I have absolutely no idea what I want to write about. I've spent the last 15 minutes trying to choke down cold Chinese food from lunch. I'm too exhausted (or lazy, take your pick) to go to the microwave in the conference room. It's 5:50 p.m. My story? Due in one hour and 10 minutes.
I have no focus. My head is blank.
This should be interesting.
Labels: 24-hour news cycle, burnout, courts, deep doo-doo, writing
continue...Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Come correct
I've never had a correction.*Knocks on wood*
I've never had a correction, and that's probably because I haven't had to report a great deal of stories that require me to fetch multi-layered, complex information. I'll get back to that.
Because in high school, I didn't see what the big deal was about a correction. So, you got something wrong in a story. Big deal.
Michael Holley, then of the Boston Globe, pretty much told me that because I'm African-American and a male that I had to be extra careful. Check everything. Three times.
"Here's the deal about corrections," he told me, chomping a ketchup-drenched french-fry at T. Anthony's in Boston. "With each one, you lose your credibility as a journalist. And all you have as a journalist is your credibility."
I'm 23 and I have never, to my knowledge, so much as spelled a person's name wrong in a story. Does this mean I'm overdue? I was pondering that thought this afternoon while reporting a story about an East Quogue, NY resident who makes birdhouses and signs out of salvaged materials from demolished houses. He mentioned rackling some materials from a mansion that I can't say for sure has ever existed on Long Island, save for a few random allusions that come up when you do a Google search. I wasn't satisfied.
My paper's (you can guess what paper that is by now, no?) library told me to take a look at a book called The Mansions of Long Island's Gold Coast. I looked on the book's accompanying website and still didn't find it.
I had the perfect, or perhaps, imperfect formula: relying upon local histories and a bad Google search. I wasn't willing to chance it, especially when I know that there are niche experts hanging around who recite the names of these things at wine tastings in the Hamptons for fun. Show me a correction and I'll show you a shaky foundation, source or story idea.
In the past I would have taken the entire graf in question out before my editor ever saw it. That habit probably has something to do with why I have never had a correction run that I was responsible for. But I'm going to report this one out. Why?
I've come to think a correction can serve as a rite of passage, and whether you've had one or not, going around trying to avoid them isn't going to make you a better reporter. (Let the church say -- ) But, then I read this quote from Don Wycliff, formerly Public Editor of the Chicago Tribune. And I have second thoughts.
"We had some disagreement about how to treat corrections, about how to handle reporters that make [a] number of errors," he said in comment published on Poynter.org, in which he then did what is known as keeping it real: "If you make more than your share of corrections, no matter who you are, you're in deep shit."
Labels: corrections, deep doo-doo, lazy reporting
continue...