The dark side of citizen journalism
The New York Times has a Bloomberg News report that the SEC is investigating a false report on CNN’s citizen journalist web site that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. The story sent Apple’s stock into a swoon.
The web has in the past been used as a way for speculators to pump and dump stock, or cause stock to fall so they could win by selling short. If
- Steve Jobs
we’re elevating comments to the work of ‘citizen journalists’ are we devaluing journalism? THe Public Radio News Directors’ slogan in ‘everyone needs an edit’. Citizen journalists publish first.
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3 Comments, Comment or Ping
ross
Another perspective from the San Jose Mercury News
http://tiny.cc/nOOyk
Oct 4th, 2008
jalhashal
This goes back to our discussions on trust and credibility in the blogsphere. It is not that traditional journalism has never made similar mistakes in the past, the question here really is whose responsibility is it anyway to verify the information? I would posit that it is the resposibility of the information seeker to verify its credibility especially if they are using that information to make sensitive decisions.
The Technorati Authority number for iReport.com, the site that published the rumors, is 1815. To put that number in prespective, the TA for the The Huffington Post is 28,322, for Gizmodo is 20,991, for TechCrunch is 21,578. So who is to blame here? The investors that rushed to action based on information on a site of questionable authority or the “citizen journalist” who reported news worthy of a gossip reporting channel.
Oct 4th, 2008
Cindy Wong
I’d like to add to that — the story about how United Airlines stock price dropped due to bad sourcing of financial news. Due to a clueless financial analyst who read an old news story and thought it was new, United’s stock bombed after Bloomberg had posted the old newspaper story as though it was new info.
Story here over how it occured:
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/travelers_check/archives/2008/09/the_wild_ride_i.html?campaign_id=twxa
Oct 5th, 2008
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