An earlier post on this site reported that the citizen-journalism site NowPublic had laid off most of its staff, and suggested the site could be facing closure. It was based on a single well-placed source, and it was published with the limits of that information stated.
NowPublic’s founders disputed the conclusion. Co-founder Len Brody said on Twitter that the company was “moving forward and working on the mandate we have been from day one”, and attributed the layoffs to the sale to Examiner.com the previous September rather than to a wind-down: “NowPublic is NOT closed.” Co-founder Mike Tippett put it more briefly in a Facebook status update — reports of the site’s death had been greatly exaggerated.
The original post had not in fact said NowPublic was dead, but it had raised doubts about the site’s future on the strength of one source, and it travelled a good deal further than that framing did. The episode is a reasonable illustration of what publishing a partially-sourced story into a fast network does to it: the qualification is the first thing lost.