Too simplistic to blame Twitter for journalistic lapses: Public Editor

By now, I would expect that all journalists invested in their future in journalism have let go of any silly notions that Twitter is merely a medium for sharing the trivial and the titillating.

That attitude is so 2010. Back then, when I wrote about “the Twitter transformation,” I told you that some news veterans were disdainful of the then relatively new digital tool that allows real-time sharing of information in 140 characters or less.

Certainly within the “twitterverse” you can still find the trivial (yes, some do still share what they ate for breakfast) and the titillating. And too much that is mean-spirited. But hasn’t that always been the case for any medium of communication?

For journalists and news organizations, Twitter is now a vital tool, especially when news breaks. It allows journalists to tell you almost instantaneously what we learn, whether on the scene or by connecting directly to participants and witnesses.

Yes, instant news does bring real risks of getting it wrong. I’ll get to that. But I do so believing Twitter is an important medium for journalism. What’s at issue is figuring out how to use it in a way that’s aligned with journalistic values of verification, accuracy and transparency.

These questions will be explored in Toronto next week in a “J-Talks” session, sponsored by the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Headlining the panel is Andy Carvin, NPR’s senior social media strategist and author of the recently released Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring and a Journalism Revolution. As the Star’s Michelle Shephard writes in today’s World Weekly section, Carvin became known as “the man who tweets revolutions” when he tweeted thousands of daily, first-hand, live reports from citizens at the heart of the Arab Spring.

The J-Talks session also features two other veteran journalists: digital pioneer Mathew Ingram, senior media writer for GigaOM, and Esther Enkin, the recently appointed ombudsman for CBC English services. I am moderating the session.

Entitled “The Twitter Effect: Is Journalism Still Able to Get it Right?” this panel came about in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting tragedy when much false information circulated within mainstream news websites and social media. Most egregious: many reported the wrong shooter, naming Ryan Lanza when it was actually his brother Adam. (Happily, due to the newsroom’s diligence, the Star did not report this erroneous information.)

Then, as was the case in just about any major breaking news story in recent years, many journalists and news organizations gave readers false information in the rush to report at Twitter speed. Sometimes that wrong stuff was reported on Twitter first, other times by mainstream means first. In all cases, it was amplified in the echo chambers of Twitter.

And each time, Twitter took the blame for the downfall of journalistic standards.

I think blaming this new medium is too simplistic.

Certainly journalists must figure out how to reconcile the conflict of reporting breaking stories in real time with the essential journalistic value of verification, which means “getting what happened down right.”

But, as the J-Talks panellists tell me, we need to do that within the reality that getting what happened down right when news breaks has always been somewhat messy.

Even when journalists reported for a daily news cycle, we understood the truth of the now clichéd statement that “news is the best available version of the truth.” In the chaos of reporting breaking news on deadline, that meant we sometimes didn’t have everything right when it came time to publish. We updated in next-day stories and published corrections.

Now that the news cycle never ends and Twitter can mean reporting on minute-to-minute deadlines, what should verification in journalism entail?

Does it mean telling you only what we know with absolute certainty? Or can it mean being transparent with you about what we are unsure about but trying to verify? Do we need a more effective corrections process for real-time news?

These are critical questions as journalism evolves and embraces new tools, particularly for legacy news organizations such as the Star where credibility matters much. Long-held standards of verification have served readers well here.

Those standards boil down to a simple dictum, still well worth a tweet for thought: “When in doubt, don’t report.”