I was almost buying the latest post by Nimrod Studios (Cliff Leftwich) on the collaborative blog Unceremoniously Dispatched, which features posts by a plethora of former Richmond Times-Dispatch writers. Almost.
But then he did two things that lost me -- he used a stupid example, and he changed the question.
The original question framed in his post -- which essentially asks whether the public should rely on weblogs for news -- was about trust. But toward the end of the post he reframed it: The question is "Who do YOU believe?"
There's a difference. But I think the answer is increasingly obvious -- the public, or that portion of the public that uses social/new media as an information vehicle, trusts both the bloggers and the traditional news outlets.
The bigger question, and it is one that everyone in the news business is grappling with, has as much to do with relevance as it does trust or reliance.
Leftwich cites the YouTube footage of a young woman, dead in the streets of Tehran. The suggestion he makes is that we can't trust that footage -- it's a single-sourced video sequence that could have been produced in a back lot.
But the reality is that a lot of mainstream news professionals not only used the video in their coverage of last week's events in Iran -- they double-checked its validity. Jim Sciutto of ABC News is a great example of a journalist who cited and linked to the video on Twitter, and then did additional background on it for ABC News.
Sciutto made the story relevant to his readers in three specific ways:
- He told it fast -- using Twitter, Sciutto has been keeping his followers actively engaged in the stories from Iran as they unfold. He was telling the story first.
- He checked his facts -- Sciutto didn't just trust the YouTube video as fact, but he dug deeper to not only validate the story but to give it richer context.
- He built context -- digging deeper gave Sciutto an opportunity to make the story his own, even though he was sparked by YouTube to chase it.
