Jeff Jarvis, taking note of the horrible mis-reporting of the West Virginia mine deaths last night, says:
The next time I hear someone being haughty about professional news vs. citizen’s news, I’ll remind them of the West Virginia tragedy, where news traveled ahead of the facts, where everyone was horribly wrong.
Let’s all remember that, shall we?
Meanwhile, Steve Outing offers some sound advice to newspapers that printed erroneous headines, including:
Since newspapers are now publishing to multiple media formats, and because they (should have) collected e-mail addresses of their print-edition customers, they could have sent out an “urgent correction” updating the story. If the paper has a cell-phone news service, they could use that, too.