Tuesday, February 04, 2014

How breaking news is breaking us: The rush to report Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death...

Philip Seymour Hoffman died yesterday. This was the first and only thing we were told. Arguably, we were told too soon. The news came via a tweet from the Wall Street Journal, preceded by that all-too-familiar word, “Breaking.” But aside from the text of the tweet itself, there was no additional reporting to verify the announcement. That would come approximately 17 minutes later. In the interim, the news went viral. Online publications were willing to believe the Wall Street Journal before it posted a news brief to corroborate its tweet, but prefaced its own writeups and retweets with disclaimers like, “no confirmation yet, but …” Readers were also reticent as they sent the news further into the world, asking, “Is anyone else reporting this?” Some expressed their hopes that the news was a hoax.

Seventeen minutes isn’t a long time. But it’s long enough to ask questions about what it means to responsibly, ethically break news. It’s long enough to wonder if it’s worth risking the credibility of a historically reputable print brand just to be first to tweet a celebrity’s death online. By the time the Wall Street Journal posted its first brief, the New York Times had also begun to report facts in the case. The most disturbing of these was the mention that an official had requested anonymity as he gave sensitive details to the press — including that Hoffman passed of an apparent overdose — “because he was not certain the actor’s family had been informed of the death.” (The Times has since apparently removed that text from their article on Hoffman’s death, but the paragraph was quoted elsewhere.)

In short: Twitter and, within the space of 17 minutes, the Internet-accessing world may have known that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead in his apartment before his three young children, with whom he was scheduled to spend the day, and his longtime partner, Mimi O’Donnell. Full story...

Related posts:
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  2. Tweeting our way to oblivion...
  3. "Facebook is the most dangerous assault weapon in the world..."
  4. Worse than meth: Facebook is altering your mind and turning you into a slave...
  5. Facebook and Twitter are creating a vain generation of self-obsessed people...
  6. Youngsters check their phones every ten minutes

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