I watched with sadness yesterday the developing story of the death of movie star Heath Ledger. I’m a TMZ.com fan, so their RSS feed was extremely useful. At one point, however, they reported that Ledger had died in the apartment of Mary Kate Olsen, which was incorrect. The New York Times’ “City Room” blog also got it wrong, and I’m not sure who got it wrong first (sigh).

Both corrected the mistake and moved on, and I thought to myself, “Boy, we’re going to hear the critics come out of the woodwork on this one.” TMZ took some criticism in its comments, but a piece in the Los Angeles Times poses a fascinating concept about what really happened from a journalistic perspective.

But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.

What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

So a part of the “process” of news is mistakes, and the ethical question is does it matter in a world of news-as-a-process? I’m not so sure it does, as long as mistakes are corrected — just as, I might add, they are corrected in the newsgathering process in professional newsrooms.

Hmm.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.