{"id":2748,"date":"2008-10-03T16:34:28","date_gmt":"2008-10-03T20:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2748"},"modified":"2008-10-03T16:34:28","modified_gmt":"2008-10-03T20:34:28","slug":"steve-jobs-citizen-journalism-didnt-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/10\/03\/steve-jobs-citizen-journalism-didnt-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Jobs: Citizen journalism didn’t fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taking the train to work this morning, little did I know that I would get sucked into a blog- and Twitter-storm over the essence of journalism, social media, “citizen journalism”<\/a> and a bunch of other topics. That’s how things roll in the blogosphere: one minute you’re reading Twitter, and the next minute you’re trying to defend journalism, or being attacked for not defending it, or some combination of the two. My mistake — and I do think it was a mistake — was to post a Twitter message after seeing a report on CNN’s iReport “citizen journalism” portal about Steve Jobs having a heart attack (a link I got from a Twitter post by Loren Feldman).<\/p>\n

I said there were reports of a heart attack, but that they were unverified<\/a>. A minute or two later, I said that the sources were iReport and a comment from someone at Digg who said they heard it on the news. A few minutes later, I said that it could easily have been a troll, or someone trying to move the stock price (which did drop as a result of the news). A few minutes after that, someone pointed to a report at Silicon Alley Insider<\/a>, that said Henry Blodget had called Apple and gotten a denial, as others subsequently did. All’s well that ends well, right? Well, maybe not (Henry’s justification of his own reporting of the rumour is here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I got a number of comments after my initial Twitter message that said I shouldn’t have posted anything without confirming it. Kara Swisher of All Things D, whom I consider a friend, scolded me<\/a> for doing so without calling anyone, and later said<\/a> that she never reports anything unless she knows it to be true. Should I have called someone? Perhaps — although I was on the train, and I don’t have Apple’s head of PR on speed-dial, as some people do. And in retrospect, a single unsourced rumour on iReport and a comment at Digg was probably not enough to go on. Point taken.<\/p>\n

As I said on Twitter<\/a>, I often feel like I’m working without a net when I blog or post messages to Twitter or otherwise use social media. Am I journalist? Yes. But I’m also a person. Do people who read my Twitter posts expect journalism, or do they expect a person? To be honest, I think that varies. Some people who commented on Twitter said<\/a> they were fine with me posting the rumour, since I said it was unverified, and that as far as they’re concerned<\/a>, Twitter is “like a digital water-cooler” and therefore standards are looser (and yet in some cases better<\/a>). Others said they agreed with Kara and that they expect better of me<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fair enough. Like I said, I’m learning as I go. But does this mean citizen journalism has failed<\/a>? I don’t think so. As I commented at Zoli Erdos’s blog<\/a>, and on the Read\/WriteWeb post, it didn’t take long for the rumour to be corrected (and not by a traditional journalist either), and as far as I’m concerned, that is what social media or citizen journalism or whatever you want to call it is supposed to be about<\/a> — it’s a process, not an event. Can it be abused? Obviously it can. Should we all be a little more careful, myself included, before we rush to post something? Sure we should. Did citizen journalism (or whatever you call it) fail? No.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taking the train to work this morning, little did I know that I would get sucked into a blog- and Twitter-storm over the essence of journalism, social media, “citizen journalism” and a bunch of other topics. That’s how things roll in the blogosphere: one minute you’re reading Twitter, and the next minute you’re trying to … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Steve Jobs: Citizen journalism didn’t fail”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}