Years ago at KING5.com, I launched the site’s first blog with (gasp!) open comments. What if, I was asked, someone posts something that’s untrue? After all, that comment would be connected, although indirectly, to the KING 5 brand. Well, I responded, our readers are smart enough to know that user comments aren’t the same as our reporting. The line is clear.
Fast forward to today and a posting on CNN’s iReport.com that claimed Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Some blogs picked it up and Apple’s stock took a momentary nose dive. iReport removed the story, but the SEC wants to know who posted it. “‘Citizen journalism’ apparently just failed its first significant test,” wrote the Silicon Alley Insider. “Do false reports like this damage CNN’s credibility? The answer is yes, absolutely,” says ReadWriteWeb.
But I agree with Staci Kramer on PaidContent — citizen journalism hasn’t failed any test. “The site clearly bills material as unedited and unfiltered,” Staci writes (iReport is a completely separate site from CNN.com with downplayed CNN branding). “It’s up to us as journalists and sharers of information to decide how we make use of any unsubstantiated reports.” Absolutely. It’s much like taking a comment on a blog — obviously unedited and unsubstantiated — and passing it along as possibly true. Not true, necessarily, but possibly true. Somehow, this is good enough for some happy-go-lucky bloggers who are so fascinated with being “first” that they’ll blog just about anything and end it with a question mark. And stranger yet, people who actually make investment decisions believe them. This is not CNN’s fault: it’s the blogs that perpetuated the comment and the insecure investors who followed suit, pure and simple. (Full disclosure: I work for CNN.com’s competitor, msnbc.com.)