© Copyright 2000
S. Camille Broadway.
All rights reserved.
Questions? Comments?
Contact me at:
scbroadway@mindspring. com

Is is better to be faster or more accurate?

24-hour deadlines

In talking with journalists in traditional media, the most frequent complaint is that the Internet has sped up news to the point that unconfirmed rumors get posted in the rush to be first with the most. Accuracy, quality and credibility are sacrificed for speed.

The fear is everyone in online news will turn into Matt Drudge, the Internet gossip columnist who once estimated the information he distributes is about 80 percent accurate. Drudge broke several of the stories about the Monica Lewinsky scandal before traditional news organizations like Newsweek could confirm enough information to get the story in print.

But some dispute that Drudge should even be talked about as an online journalist. "Users do not go to the Drudge report for trustworthy news, they go for titillating, Beltway cocktail party chatter that may or may not be true. It's sort of journalism light," J.D. Lasica, a new media columnist for the American Journalism Review, told a panel at the University of California Berkley in April 1998. "I understand that Drudge in the past has sort of balked at the term journalist, and one of the real ironic asides in all of this is that we've got a gossip columnist who refuses to tarred with the epithet 'journalist.' "

Wherever Drudge exists on the journalism continuum, online news outlets are still seen as pushing credible news organizations to rush to print stories that do not meet the usual standards for accuracy.

"I think the fast part of it is the really damaging thing to our credibility," Washington Post reporter David Broder told a National Press Club audience on Feb. 12, 2000. "I have been on the set when some 12-year-old rushes a piece of copy (to the anchor people), they read it, and at the next commercial break, having some sense of judgment and perspective, one or the other will say, 'Where the hell did that come from?' But by now it's out there in the ether."

However, those who work in online news don't share quite the fear about Drudge and the speed factor.

Clair Whitmer, of CNET.com and a former editor for InfoWorld and Mac Week, was also part of the April 1998 panel on credibility and new media at UC Berkeley. Having worked on both print and online publications, Whitmer said she feels less deadline pressure at CNET than at print publications.

"Five minutes to deadline is five minutes to deadline, no matter where you're working," Whitmer said. "But if I'm an editor for a print publication and it's five minutes to deadline, I have five minutes to make the decision about whether or not to run a story. If I'm working online, I don't have to make that decision in five minutes. I can stay there for another two or three hours torturing the reporter until I'm satisfied with it, and I'll still have time to beat the morning papers."

Michael Oreskes, in a piece for the American Journalism Review, noted that working under extreme deadline pressure has been part and parcel of journalism from the beginning.

"One obvious element of my definition of a journalist is someone able to produce reliable work under the pressure of time," Oreskes writes. "We all understand this a rough first draft of history. An editor's reach must exceed his grasp or what good is a second edition?"

The wire services and the 24-hour television news channels, like the Internet, never have a fixed deadline. News sets its own pace. And sometimes the pace of news is faster than the pace of careful consideration.

Oreskes says that online journalists editing in a constant deadline world should follow a simple motto from the International News Service: Get it first, but first get it right. "A motto that would have protected our newspaper colleagues from well-known blunders in which they rushed onto the Internet with stories they later had to retract in whole or part," Oreskes wrote.