Thanks for your comment. The piece was not meant as an attack on you or NPR but unfortunately the Giffords case is an example of a profession that sometimes moves to fast.

As for the specifics that you outline here, I think that, yes, the need to slow down and fact-check is necessary, especially when it comes to breaking news. You do this now on Twitter when you ask the crowd for confirmation.

In this case, I think both the Web editor and the person tweeting (you) needed to fact-check — I know of other news organizations where the Web platform will do its own reporting against what their broadcast platform is reporting.

Is it practical? Well, I think the value of being “first” today is overblown when we measure all the stumbles we’ve seen. I like ESPN’s idea of not breaking news on Twitter….it creates a slowing down process.

chrs,
Steve

Andy Carvin here. Bringing up the NPR example is always an important one – I should know, as I was the one who wrote that tweet. The one thing I’m still trying to figure out is what practices could have been in place to have prevented me from sending the tweet.

The problem is that this was first and foremost a reporting mistake. The editor running the news desk that day decided to report her “death” on our hourly radio newscast. The weekend Web editors were then alerted to this, and they posted it as the lead story on our homepage, then sent out an email alert to our breaking news subscribers. That’s actually how I found out about it – I was at a restaurant with my family and got the breaking news alert from NPR. It was at that point that I noticed that no one was updating NPR’s Twitter account – its most recent post was reporting Giffords was alive – so I took the headline as represented on our homepage and in the breaking news alert.

So does that leave me partially at fault? In the sense that I was part of the cascade of failures that day, yes. But it was indeed a cascade – something that was reported first on radio, then the Web, then email, and then twitter. But does that make it primarily a twitter mistake that could have been avoided in the way you outlined in your post?

The following day, I wrote on a blog discussing the mistake that I felt I needed to report it on twitter, since we had already done so on our other platforms; second-guessing our editors and asking them for more proof is the job of our other editors. But is it my job too? Is it realistic for staff who maintain a news org’s presence on additional platforms and aren’t part of the editorial change to challenge the reporting that’s already been edited and appeared on our primary platforms? Practically speaking, it’s impossible to do it routinely, or everything would grind to a halt. But should there exceptions?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. – Andy

Thanks,
andy