Verification in journalism in the age of real-time tweets

An afternoon session at the New Journalism, New Ethics? conference at UW-Madison in April 2010 asked a question that has not aged: “What Ever Happened to Verification in Journalism?” The panel put a reporter, a network correspondent, a media columnist and an academic around the same table, and they did not agree.

Kristin Czubkowski — blogger at Laptop City Hall and government reporter at The Capital Times — started by doubting the premise that verification had gone away, then supplied the counter-example herself: she had retweeted a piece of breaking news, and only afterwards considered that it might have been worth checking first. The admission is the useful part of the session, because it describes the gap the panel was actually arguing about — not a change of standards, but the speed at which a publishing decision now gets made.

Scott Cohn, senior correspondent at CNBC, took the harder line. The pressure to keep pushing content out raises the potential for inaccuracy, he argued, and “tweets are not journalism” — journalism being the reporting of facts through an editorial process. On that definition the platform is disqualified by what it lacks rather than by what it carries.

The counter-argument, made in the ambient-journalism work presented elsewhere that year, is that an editorial process can run in distributed and collaborative form on social media, outside the formal structures of a newsroom, and that a platform is not journalism or non-journalism in itself. The test is the content, not the medium.

Sue Robinson, journalism professor at the UW School of Journalism and Mass Communication, brought audience research to it, and it cut across both positions. Her work on audience perception found that many people already treated a tweet from a journalist as journalism, whatever the profession thought. That makes audience expectation part of the calculation rather than a consequence of it: if readers do not draw the line between a story and a tweet, a newsroom that draws it internally has not communicated anything. Robinson also argued that readers carry an ethical obligation of their own to understand the different forms — the argument behind Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive project.

Phil Rosenthal, media columnist at the Chicago Tribune, allowed that a tweet can be news if it is properly vetted, and pointed to the compensating mechanism: the same channel that carries the error carries the correction back instantly, and does it in front of the same audience. “The audience will always hold you accountable,” he said.

The split the panel exposed — speed against process, platform against practice — is still the shape of the argument in most newsrooms, and the session is a useful marker of how early it was already recognisable.