Sunday July 12, 2009

I got RIProlled

Stray Thoughts by A.ASOHAN

Those who live by so-called new media, die by new media – some hard-won lessons for this columnist.

IT was, as they say, a perfect storm.

Our Digital News and News desks work together to bring you the latest news, with our responsibility being to get it out as quickly as possible through The Star’s various non-print channels – SMS alerts, online, and our news feeds to the projection screens you see in some shopping malls.

This sometimes means working on a few stories concurrently, on various channels as well, and monitoring different sources.

Our main source is, of course, The Star reporters on the ground, who may send updates in any number of ways – via SMS, through the Twitter microblogging site (as mentioned in this column on June 28; This time, it’s personal), or by calling the desk directly and dictating their stories.

Between the two desks, we have to quickly edit the copy and publish it on the various platforms above before our competitors beat us to the punch.

Lesson #1: The default setting in most newsrooms has always been “chaos,” with profanity and humour being optional.

On June 30, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak announced a slew of economic liberalisation measures, and we were getting the news bit by bit from our reporters on the ground.

My colleague at the Digital News desk had her hands full dealing with this – sending out SMS alerts, and updating and rewriting our online story on-the-go as more information became available.

There were also developments in the upcoming “Sodomy II” trial, and various other important news stories as well. It made the typical newsroom of a Hollywood movie look like another sedate day at The Office.

Lesson #2: There will always be external factors and many reasons leading up to a screwup, but in our profession this is never an excuse.

Twitter was suddenly flooded by people asking whether it was true that 1980s pop star Rick Astley had died. Some “confirmed” the news but could not cite sources. Text messages started coming in from friends and colleagues, asking about it.

Searching through the usual news sources produced squat.

Lesson #3: Friends may be the first to give you the news, whether confirmed or not, but professional journalists still have a role to play in terms of verifying it. It was a bad week for celebrity deaths – Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon, with Zsa Zsa Gabor being hospitalised as well.

Lesson #4: Synchronicity may be an interesting concept but has never been scientifically proven.

It was also a week for celebrity death hoaxes: Jeff Goldblum, Natalie Portman, and George Clooney were among the big names affected, but their agents or managers were quick to issue denials.

Lesson #5: Sometimes, coincidences are more than just that and may be indicative of a trend.

Then someone on Twitter pointed to a news report on CNN’s iReport subsection.

Finally, I foolishly thought, a credible source! And since it was purportedly a report from the Associated Press, which we have electronic rights to, I quickly uploaded the story, sent out an SMS alert and even “tweeted” it on my personal account.

In old media journalism, a story doesn’t see print until it goes through a few layers of checks and balances. In new media journalism, the guy at the keyboard has to sometimes assume all these roles.

Clicking on that final icon to publish is the equivalent of giving a story the final critical eye, sending the page to print, getting the paper off the presses, and distributing it to all your readers.

You have to make instant judgement calls, and I made a terrible one that day.

Lesson #6: The rules of Journalism 101 – whether you learned them in the classroom or the newsroom – still apply: check and re-check your sources.

The Internet is full of rumour, speculation, and conjecture, but it is still the responsibility of media organisations to separate the wheat from the chaff.

That particular section of CNN is dedicated to “user-generated content,” or as some people call it, citizen or participatory journalism.

It is unedited and unfiltered. Anybody can submit anything.

Within minutes, there were indications that the story on Astley dying in a hotel room in Berlin was a hoax. I added a disclaimer to the story, and quickly took it down.

Despite this, hours later our story was still the top-ranked item if you did a search on Google News, even if it did take you to a “Story file not found” entry.

Lesson #7: The Internet never forgets. Misery loves company, and I was glad to find out that a fellow journalist at a news website had also sent out the alert. The independent portal was quicker in issuing a correction;I decided to wait for an actual confirmation, not least because doubts had started cropping up.

On some online forums, people said that German TV and radio stations were reporting Astley’s death as well.

This was not verified, and it was noted that these broadcasts could have been fooled by the iReport hoax as well.

Finally, Astley’s manager, Tops Henderson, issued a statement on the singer’s official website and we sent out a correction. But the damage had been done.

Astley, so long away from the public eye, came back into it in 2007 when Internet pranksters did the old “bait and switch” – a link on a completely different topic would take you to a video of Astley singing his 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Fall for the prank, and you were “RickRolled”.

Those who fell for the death hoax, like me, have been “RIProlled” in Internet parlance.

The episode led to much pontificating within media circles on the dangers of the online world, but I think many have missed the point. In fact, the hoax story was put up by the 4chan.org website, which has been described as “subversive, brilliant, and disturbing”, to make a point.

The Internet intensifies everything – it takes the best and worst of what makes us human, and collates all this into a thick concentrate.

Just look at how ugly online discussion forums can get. But it doesn’t change the basics of our profession.

News organisations being taken in by hoaxes? Nothing new there, it goes back to the 19th century. Just check out the Museum of Hoaxes (museumofhoaxes.com) for some of the classics.

Lesson #8: The Internet is no excuse for sloppy journalism. The pressure today is greater, and thus, so are the demands on our profession.

A columnist at a local business weekly, using my gaffe as an example, wrote about the hazards of Internet reporting, and also blogged about it on the weekly’s online portal. However, in detailing the events, he reported that The Star used Twitter to alert its readers.

As “proof,” he provided a screen-capture of my personal Twitter account (twitter.com/ Asohan), not The Star’s, which is twitter.com/staronline.

In fact, The Star did not issue any tweets on the supposed death, only on the possibility, and later the confirmation that it was a hoax.

So are we going to one day read that The Star tweeted that it will be spending the weekend on a Star Trek video marathon with the kids?

Lesson #9: Being slow and steady doesn’t shield you from the occasional stumble either.

Sure, it’s flattering to be considered synonymous with the company that employs me, but it’s also misleading and can actually be dangerous.

Many people “re-tweet” Star SMS alerts, and so do some of my colleagues. They may even add some pithy comment, as do I. Are there people out there taking our personal tweets as official tweets from The Star, despite disclaimers? That’s a scary thought.

That spirit of “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah” journalism was also seen in another English daily, which was ironic given that two years ago, it ran a story on Malaysian men rushing off to Russia for experimental penis enlargement surgery, and got feedback from actual medical experts here on why such procedures may be dangerous.

Except that it was basing its report on an April Fool’s article in a local medical blog, which was even tagged under “Humour”. Even after the joke was outed by the blogger himself (tinyurl.com/mzhmtl) and by blogger-turned-MP Jeff Ooi on his Screenshots blog (tinyurl.com/lujhmk), the article is still available online.

Lesson #10: Oh, this one’s too easy. Make a sentence with these words – glass houses, stones, throw.

A. Asohan, Digital News Editor at The Star, may not have that Star Trek marathon after all, no matter what The Star tweets about it.

Source:

Contact Us

News Poll

Latest Jobs from Star-Jobs

Latest from StarProperty