Where's That Tide Schedule?

Nobody likes to make mistakes, least of all newspaper people.

Mistakes I made led me to exit the industry butt-first in 2005. I regret the mistakes still. But the corrections were handled as they should have been: Swiftly and prominently.

So I read with great interest a debate on Scott Rosenberg’s blog Wordyard about whether news organizations (and by extension, anyone looking to keep a reputation of accuracy in any kind of social media) should delete erroneous tweets as part of a corrective action or leave the tweets to hang in the twittersphere as part of the overall public record.

This goes far beyond the typical newsroom correction debate, parodied in an unforgettable Bloom County comic strip in which Ace Reporter Milo Bloom approaches editor Vanderbeek to proclaim that the sensational child-stealing epidemic the paper wrote about never actually happened.

“Yeek!” replies Vanderbeek. “Run a correction beneath the tide schedules on page 39!”

So where do I stand on the whole bald versus shaved debate?

Don’t delete.

First of all, deleting from your Twitter or Facebook account doesn’t really delete anything because you don’t know who else out there has cached the page or done some other kind of public-access archiving to preserve for posterity the terrible things that you’ve said. Appending a correction to the tweet, or as some posters on Rosenberg’s blog has suggested, adding a “correction” function to Twitter’s options make more sense, as it’s clear – and likely traceable back to the original post or tweet – what is being corrected. The additional function of retweeting the correction to everyone who retweeted the original tweet seems essential, and not outside the realm of technology.

Still, it seems easier to avoid putting out bad information in the first place.

In other words, don’t rush to post.

What I find most intriguing about this discussion are responses from the Associated Press and Dan Rather, as reported by the AP’s David Bauder:

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said that if he were covering the story in the 1970s and 1980s, he would not likely have gone with the NPR report. But if he were in the anchor chair in 2011, he probably would have.

"The pressure is immediate and almost crushing on you and your news organization to match that," he said. "Mostly what you hear are sets all over the world going to your competition and computers, handheld or otherwise, going to a different site."

NPR's reputation as a news organization would carry weight, particularly since television news organization knew NPR was more likely to have people close to the scene.

To blame the urgent drive for expediency seems dubious to me. Why rush to be the first with bad information that hasn’t been substantiated by at least two sources? Yes, there is much more instant media today than there was in the 1970s, but, frankly, we’re talking only in a matter of seconds versus a manner of minutes. If, in the 1970s, Rather would take an extra few minutes to find a second source, knowing he could get on the air within minutes with the corroborated information, why not take the time now? The pressure may be “immediate and crushing,” now, but tell me, truthfully, is it any more immediate and crushing than it was 40 years ago?

Additionally, whatever has happened to the old newsroom axiom: If your mother says she loves you, verify it? That certainly would have saved me some embarrassment in 2005, surely, as it would have many news outlets this weekend as their erroneous reports went out and were retweeted across the universe.

It also seems essential, in reading the National Public Radio ombudsman’s column on the incorrect Gabrielle Giffords information the network sent out Saturday, that reporters and social media wonks at any news organization not exist in walled gardens:

The Twittersphere exploded with scores retweeting Giffords’ supposed death, exemplifying how news travels in a nanosecond in today’s media world before anyone has time to process it.

“Within a few minutes, I started seeing other news orgs either holding back on reporting it as well as people on Twitter asking me about it,” wrote Carvin in an excellent post on Lostremote.com explaining what happened with Twitter. "About 25 minutes later, I saw that the NPR site had changed the headline from saying she had been killed to that she had been shot.”

While it’s a good thing he was watching the newsline, he shouldn’t have had to – those on the news end and the social media end ought to be talking to one another, especially in frenetic situations like these.

Get off My Blog. Or: Finally, I Understand the iPad

Suddenly, I understand the iPad. And while it's still not magical, I can see where it might fill that all-important niche.

So there’s some hand-wringing (or at least academic studying) over the fact that bloggers, in general, are getting older. Or that fewer teens are blogging. Or that younger people want to be socially connected, but not necessarily bound to a desktop computer to interact over the ethers with their peers. Or that one of these days we’re all going to throw away our damned devices and just go meet our friends face to face again and get all aghast because they got SO OLD since we last saw them in, what, 1998?

At any rate, the study, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is here.

The study is rather interesting, though I’ve only read a part of it, and parsed a bit of what they’re saying about it in the media.

Interesting fact: Few teens are using Twitter. Which I can understand – it’s basically texting with a glossy web design slapped around it.

Another interesting fact: Sites that want to stay relevant with teens are designing their sites to be easily accessed on mobile devices. They’re focusing on limited text but a lot more on photos, videos (but not Flash videos, since Apple doesn’t like Flash) and other such eye-candy.

Another interesting fact: Teens admit to reading blogs less and commenting on blogs less, leaving that demographic to we older folks who are too busy spitting our dentures out to readjust them than we are to get all mobile.

An interesting inference: This doesn’t bode well for Uncharted, because teens as well as folks over 30 are increasingly more mobile, more socially connected. We don’t have that ability yet. We’re falling behind the curve. We’re pretty much a blog-leaning social media website that’s light on the social part of the media. We don’t yet have that critical mass audience, and, if these numbers are anything to worry about, we won’t get them given our current strategy. We’re trying to figure out how to make money so we can afford to build a mobile site. At least we recognize where we need to be, if we don’t yet have the resources to be there.

And yet I have to wonder – does mobility mean everything? I have an iPod Touch that I love dearly, but there are many things I like to do on the computer, and on the Internet, that are much better suited to a larger screen. Maybe this is the niche for the iPad and similar technology that’s sure to follow: A bigger platform to get us mobile but also not so squinty.

We look back on ENIAC as quaint because it took up an entire room. Maybe teens now look at our desktops and think, wow, that thing takes up an entire desktop. With a keyboard. How quaint.



So what does that mean to folks like us? Not only do we go mobile – or at least add the capacity to go mobile without falling into the newspaper trap of thinking our mobile connections are ancillary to our “main product” – but we also have to go video. And audio. Audio and video together. We’ve got to shift gears – and this will be a tough adjustment for me – from words to images. That doesn’t mean we don’t write – we have to storyboard, and that involves a lot of planning and writing. Good thing I got that video camera for Christmas.

Ooh, What A Hypotwit

As I've done my reading the past few weeks ok the news media and it's shaky relationship with the Internet, one comment on something I read has lingered in the ol' brainium. The commented, a current member of the media, sneered at the primary post, deriding its substance and its author because the author confessed to being "a former reporter." The commented seemed to think that since the comments came from someone no longer affiliated with -- and somewhat disappointed by -- the media, that the comments were somehow less valid. That is a significant attitude coming from an individual working in an industry that uses whistleblowers, the disgruntled and easily talkative, and the industry rebels as part and parcel of their trade. Why not, I wonder, listen to the recently departed, who certainly have reasons to be disheartened with the industry, unless, of course, you don't want to hear whatever they may have to offer.

I, myself, am a former journalist, one who left for two reasons:

1) I screwed up. Muffed two stories in the same issue. I have no defense, though I bristle at being called a lazy reporter -- I was called this -- for the slipups. They were not intentional. Nor was I habitually lazy.

2) I was tired of the business. A second strike against me, obviously, in the eyes of those still in the business. But considering how many Idaho journalists have left journalism for greener pastures (Randy Stapilus keeps a list of them at ridenbaugh.com) I'm not alone. Nor do I feel shamed by it. I got my current job as a technical writer because my boss saw in my resume a person who could meet deadlines -- and I do that. I do many other things for which I developed the skills as a journalist. And, more importantly, I'm now able, both on and off the job, able to write passionately about the things I want to write about. No more boring city council meetings fir me. there are reporters out there who enjoy a good meeting, and for that I am grateful. I'm also glad I'm not one of them.

So, should my "checkered" past disqualify me as an extremely minor commentator on the state of the media today? No. If I were in the nuclear industry (which I am) and were only minorly incompetent (which I am, and which everyone is to some extent) the old media types would be glad to hear from me and others like me. But the saying goes that lawyers don't like to sue other lawyers out of professional courtesy. It appears that attitude is mirrored in media as well.