Lessons for online journalism in MJ’s death
28 June 2009Michael Jackson’s death and its lessons for online journalists covering breaking news
By Robert Niles for OJR
Every major breaking news events offers its lessons to the news organizations that covered it. And today’s death of singer Michael Jackson should lead newsrooms to reexamine how they handle breaking news in a hyper-competitive, instant-publishing environment.
I wrote last week about how news consumers used Twitter to express their displeasure, in real time and with a critical social mass, with CNN over the news network’s coverage of the developing election protests in Iran. Yesterday, Twitter again became the forum for a global event, as millions gathered on the microblogging site to share rumors about, then to confirm, then to mourn Jackson’s death.
AOL’s celebrity gossip site TMZ appeared to have been the first to report the singer’s death. Other news organizations, appropriately, waited to confirm Jackson’s passing themselves before reporting the news.
But thousands of Twitter users did not wait for additional confirmation before retweeting TMZ’s report, or sending out their own tweets about Jackson’s death. Even after the Los Angeles Times confirmed the passing, other news organizations held back before publishing the news to their Twitter feeds and e-mail alert lists.
Digital journalism leader Steve Buttry nailed the problem, appropriately enough, on his Twitter feed:
Should Washington Post and NY Times rebrand their news alerts as news “reminders”
This, after previous tweets:
Half hour or so after Twitter told me Michael Jackson died, Washington Post email alert caught up. Still waiting for NY Times “alert.”
@semayer & @conniecoyne The surprise isn’t that Twitter or TMZ are first, but the time lag between them and WaPo & NY Times “alerts.”
News organizations do not need to fall in line behind sources such as TMZ when a report like Jackson’s death breaks. The Twitterverse’s been wrong about alleged celebrity deaths before. But in this situation, smart news organizations should acknowledge to their followers and readers that they know the report is out there and that people are talking about it, and report where the organization is with its own reporting.
How hard would it be to tweet: “TMZ reports Jackson has died. We cannot confirm. Working on details”? Or “No confirmation on rumors about Jackson’s death. We’re in contact with authorities”?
Read the rest at OJR: Â http://www.ojr..org/ojr/people/robert/200906/1755/
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