I came across this An Infuriating Exchange With Another Reporter article the other day, and thought it was an interesting in a couple of ways.
The basic gist of it was that Jonah Spangenthal-Lee from Seattle’s alt-weekly The Stranger wrote to a reporter of a daily Seattle news paper, complaining that their coverage was on a story was more than little biased. The reporter denies it and points to some of his later revisions of the article. Jonah clarifies that he meant some of the first reports, not the later edits. The reporter from the daily paper then admits those earlier versions were entirely one-sided”, but didn’t have enough time for the story.
First of all, it lets me know that I should never send any private correspondence to Jonah Spangenthal-Lee. I think publishing it (even after taking the names off of it) was wrong.
I can understand that news publishing for web sites has thrown news reporters into a big uncharted territory. The needs are different. The deadlines are different. The rules may be different, etc. But it really seems to me that the reporter is missing a couple of things:
Once something is published on the web, it should be considered published and they need to stand behind each version of the story. Following up the article with updates doesn’t take away the fact that people saw and read the earlier versions. They may in many cases only see the early copies and not the later ones. (I remember looking at traffic of most articles at boston.com when I was there would usually show a significant decline day after day. I’d guess that the first day traffic would be greater than the next 29 combined.)
If the web has turned news reporting into a mode where reporters have to publish multiple versions of a story with increasing level of detail, maybe the fact gathering has to be done in a different way so that a story gets produced with increasing level of detail, rather than from one side to the other. Maybe in this case, if some of the people to interview include the police, the hospital, the driver, the bicycle riders involved, and other critical mass riders, and you may not get to them all before first publication, then maybe that would be the wrong order to use.
(updates: because the subject of this post is a bit snarky, this above most other ones I probably don’t want to play fast and loose with any updates. The title of the post first had an awful typo that I fixed, “Journalism in at Internet speed”. Then in the last sentence I clarified “the riders involved” to “the bicycle riders involved” and more importantly added the phrase “and you may not get to them all before first publication” which changes the conclusion somewhat.)