“You got it all backwards,” the caller complains.
“You quoted me as saying what someone else really said.”
“What’s wrong with you people, can’t you get it right?”
As news managers, you’ve no doubt had conversations like this. They probably always make you feel bad. And, let’s face it, sometimes they make you worry about the credibility of your newspaper or newscast.
Journalists can check the accuracy of a quote from a face-to-face or telephone interview. They simply ask people to verify what they said. If they are quoting from a document, they can call the person on the telephone. But there is a new way to gather information for stories that is not as easy to verify: It’s the wonderful world of the Internet.
Suppose the reporter got the caller’s quote from the Internet?
How can you as a news manager protect your product, keep your commitment to accuracy, and keep the Internet as a newsgathering tool?
Mike “P.C. Mike” Wendland, NBC technology reporter, Detroit Free Press columnist, and Poynter Fellow says you have to manage the Internet, just as you do other aspects of the newsroom.
The Internet has a vast amount of information and a lot of it is misinformation. So, he says managers have to teach journalists to use the Internet as a tool, rather than as a news source. It can be used to help reporters develop the questions to ask in the interview — not provide the content for the story.
| Evaluating Websites |
| From the book, “Web Wisdom” by Janet Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate: 1. Can you tell whether there are editors or fact checkers? |
| Suggestions for Managers |
| When it comes to your management of this amazing research tool, here are some ideas to consider: 1. Develop guidelines with your staff for the use of Internet-derived information in stories. |
So where do you check the accuracy of information found online? One place to start is the Internet itself.
Let me give you an example. Here’s a quote I decided to check:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
For several years I had attributed this quote to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural address as President of South Africa. Recently I’d heard that it may not have come from Mandela.
I searched Quoteland.com for the first phase, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.” The resulting screen included a posting by Marianne Williamson saying that the words are from her book, “A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles” — and that Mandela didn’t say them during his address.
I decided to double check this by going to Marianne Williamson’s own site, where she had posted this note: “This is often found on the Internet incorrectly stated as a quote by Nelson Mandela from the Inauguration Speech, 1994.”
Still, the quoted words sounded to me like something a person who had spent 27 years as a political prisoner before becoming President of the country would say.
I decided to go to the South African government and the African National Congress sites to see the text of Mandela’s address. The quote is not in the written speech posted on either of those sites.
So, in some ways the Internet can police itself, right? Not so fast says P.C. Mike: “It isn’t a magic button that can be pushed.”
As a manager you can help reporters understand how the Internet can be used. Let them know that it is a great tool for locating businesses, getting e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, finding the names of owners and staff people, or eyeballing the voting records of elected officials. All tools that good journalism needs — all tools that prepare reporters to conduct better interviews.
But, because anybody can create a website, reporters should scrutinize any information they get from the Internet.
There are some obvious signs that the information is not accurate. One of the sites I found by going to Ask Jeeves listed Mandela as the author of the now famous quote. When I went to that site, I saw that it was the musings of a person named “Parker” from Stanford.
You can make reporters’ visits to the Internet and their stories more effective by providing guidance and setting standards with them. Then, please share your success stories with us.
Sources and Sites:
1. Alexander, Janet and Marsha Ann Tate. Web Wisdom. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 1999.
2. Sreenivasan, Sree, “Judging Accuracy,” Poynter.org.
3. Dube, Jon, “Internet IQ (Information Quality) Checklist,” Poynter.org.
4. Wendland, Mike, “Caught in a Web of Terror,” PCMike.com. (A great piece of investigative work.)
