futurejournalismproject:

Felix: There’s been a lot of shamefacedness and embarrassment on Twitter from…

@poynterinstitute: Agreed if you include his statement that the organizations themselves (eg., @WSJ, @Reuters, etc) need be held to a higher standard. Doesn’t wash if @NYTimes posts errors and comes back saying, Don’t mind that, it’s idle water cooler gossip. — Michael

poynterinstitute:

Agree?

felixsalmon:

There’s been a lot of shamefacedness and embarrassment on Twitter from people who tweeted the false news that Piers Morgan had been suspended from CNN. … That said, one of the things I like about Twitter is that it behaves in many ways a lot more like a newsroom than a newspaper. Rumors happen there, and then they get shot down — no harm no foul.

I think our main accounts have to be super careful and check before posting anything. On my personal account, I feel it’s more about sharing what’s out there, but since people have started to rely on me, I have to be more careful even on my personal account.

In the case of the Piers suspension, it came from what most would consider a reliable source, the anchor at Channel 4 news in the UK. Unfortunately, that person was getting their information from a fake account on Twitter.

The lesson here is, as it often is, that it’s better to be right than to be first. I’m trying to hold myself to a higher standard and I like to think I have in the past (otherwise they wouldn’t have relied on me to begin with), I don’t think I did in this case.

Yet another reason why one should always mention who broke a story. Not only does it assign due credit, but it allows one’s readers to make their own judgments about the quality of the source. Channel 4’s Jon Snow, at least, will be slower next time to report something off of Twitter.