Archive for: journalism

Journalistic Debacle, Get A Clue!

Microsoft is taking over Yahoo!
Image by Gnal via Flickr

I worked as a journalist through college, and some after I graduated, and even today I am still producing content for both online and offline projects. As such, nothing infuriates me more then bad journalism, and lack of fact checking. Now before I get blasted, yes I’ve made mistakes, but nothing on the scale of the U.S. economy.

Over the weekend, TechCrunch along with several other media sites, pointed out an incident with The Times reporting a story on Yahoo’s possible bedding of Microsoft with their search technology. For those of us with keen eyes in the industry, the story was missing something, something we just couldn’t put our finger on…perhaps facts. TechCrunch tore the article apart by negating the supposed “facts” of the story and left the article with no leg to stand on. The key to this was that the markets were not open, otherwise a reputable paper printing material like that would have surely made an impact.

Now today, another story comes out announcing another Yahoo buyout story, this time regarding two AOL mavericks, Johnathon Miller and Ross Levinsohn. The article was bogus, the story unconfirmed, later confirmed that while the two were indeed raising money, and while they were having chat with Microsoft and Yahoo, there was no intent to purchase. This time the Wall Street Journal took the brunt of the backlash, and this time people did lose money. Stock for Yahoo jumped 11.7% which resulted in a lot of unhappy people.

This reminds me of a Twitter statement @1938media made regarding those that relied on social media as the “source” for information. “Dopes!” I believe was the word he used. Personally, I don’t know where the story came from, but where was the fact checking? In the rush to be the first to be in-the-know, a lot of people were effected by this financially. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to check facts and sources, and not always rely on the quick and easy. People need to use their own heads and thinks things through, interpret the information and make sound judgement.

You can read the entire TechCrunch article HERE.

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