News at the speed of web-chatter: what Michael Jackson can teach us about ‘News 2.0.’

It’s 3:45 PM Pacific Time, and even though no one seems to have confirmed the reports, every major media outlet is reporting that Michael Jackson has died.  Regardless of the verity of the reports, I think that watching the story grow on Facebook and Twitter over the last half hour has highlighted a couple of interesting things about how news and information are spread online.  Some of it is fascinating, but some of it is downright troubling.

TMZ, an online celebrity gossip publication which hardly can be classified as a reliable news outlet, was the first to break the story that Jackson had been dead at the scene.  Within two minutes of that story’s publication, I began seeing reposts on my Facebook feed.  Within 25 minutes, every single new Facebook status appearing was expressing grief over his death.

A quick look at Google News, however, revealed that — at that point — it was still only TMZ reporting that Jackson had died.  Every other article reported only that he had been hospitalized.  I monitored the Google News feed for the next half hour or so, watching the story develop, mostly because it was fascinating to watch a story like this evolve in real time.  Soon, an LA Times blogger picked up the TMZ article as a citation for their own “Michael Jackson has Died” headline.  Within a minute or two of that, MSNBC was reporting the same thing, but citing the LA Times for its reference.  Friends in my Facebook news feed then began reporting that MSNBC had confirmed the story.

Obviously, we live in a world where information comes to us in realtime.  We’ve seen, in the last week, what kind of an incredible positive impact that has had in Iran — where protesters have managed to continue organizing and spreading images and stories through Twitter, even in the midst of a media blackout.  For one of the first times in history, new media has allowed information in this type of conflict to flow two-ways, making information dissemination more efficient in many ways than it has been in previous conflicts.

But here I think we can see a clear downside.  In the past, media outlets had the luxury, small as it was, of time.  You had till 6 or 11 PM to run your news broadcast, or until midnight to start the presses.  There was time for you to collect the information, find your own sources, and properly verify a story before you ran it.  In this case, it took less than an hour for all the major media outlets to begin citing eachother in a giant loop in an obvious mad rush to not get behind in running the story.

As near as I can tell, all the stories being run right now can still trace their citations back to the TMZ article, even though they’ve ceased to cite it, opting instead to cite the other media giants.

Now that another twenty minutes have gone by, it seems clear that the reports probably have it right.  But that doesn’t make me feel any better about the process that I just witnessed.  The way that information is exchanged today is clearly a powerful positive in nearly every conceivable way.  But we cannot allow the speed at which information is exchanged to be an excuse for cutting corners in ethical journalistic process.

Tags: michael jackson, news media