I have always believed that online journalism can be just as ethical and credible as its print counterpart. A blog, a Twitter feed, a newspaper — they are all just platforms for delivery; the credibility of the content being delivered comes from the people creating the content and therefore is cross-platform.

Unfortunately, this shameful display by Gawker and TechCrunch demonstrates why blogs and news sites have had to fight the stigma and stereotype of being unreliable or unethical. Both reported rumors of Apple being in talks to buy Twitter, even though both had strong suspicions that the gossip was baseless. Their justification? It’s part of the “rawness of blogging”, as stated by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and author of his site’s report on the rumor (and here’s more from Arrington in response to the NYT piece).

Some have defended this as just process journalism — the idea that journalism online, being an open process, works differently than journalism in print, which is a closed process. I’m fine with the concept of open-process journalism, where the news is an ongoing process, so a journalist doesn’t necessarily present a “complete” product to the readers. Rather, journalists present what they have at that moment, and involve the readers in filling in the blanks. That’s fine. But my issue is that if you bother to do any kind of digging at all, you can find evidence that this is not what’s happening in this case.

Let’s look at the Apple-Twitter coverage on TechCrunch. The initial report of the rumor was published on May 5. I did a search on TechCrunch.com for “apple twitter” and sorted the results by date (the initial report is on the third page of the results). On the same day the initial rumor report was posted, TechCrun also ran an item about how bookies were favoring an Apple buyout of Twitter and a guest post about how Amazon should be the one to buy Twitter instead. After that, in the 33 days since the original report, TechCrunch has run ZERO follow-up on the rumor. Then I thought, maybe they posted something in the comment thread on the original story. So I clicked through a number of the 400-some comments on that original story, and saw nothing.

Now, let’s look at Gawker. Its initial report of the rumor also ran on May 5. A search for “apple twitter” shows two posts with those terms since the initial report, neither of which has anything to do with the rumor of the buyout.

So where is the follow-up by either? That’s supposed to be part of process journalism, right? Was there nothing to report in the month since the initial rumors were reported? Well, on May 7, two days after the original TechCrunch and Gawker reports, there was this item citing Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, denying that his company is up for sale. Twenty days later, the New York Post delivered a similar report. So obviously there were things worth reporting. So I ask again: Where is the follow-up by TechCrunch and Gawker? WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE OF A PROCESS AT WORK?

From what I can find, there was no journalism in this case, either as a process or a product. There was no documented attempt at follow-up, and even when there was new development — when the Twitter folks denied that the company is up for sale — there was no acknowledgment of that denial from the sources that initially reported the rumor. TechCrunch says in its report that it could not confirm the rumor, yet that didn’t stop it from fueling said unsubstantiated rumor by running two sidebars whose existence was justified solely by TechCrunch’s own report of that rumor. Unless you are incredibly naive or simply refuse to utter an ill word against new media, you can see that this was not a “here’s what we know, now tell us what you know” attempt to start an open-source process of journalistic reporting. This was fueling the rumor mill — and drawing lots of hits — without doing anything to advance the reporting. This was not a case of product vs. process journalism. This was a case of NO journalism.

“Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap.”

What bothers me most about this case is not the fact that the two sites did some shabby journalism, but rather that they, and their defenders, see nothing wrong with what they did and in fact try to justify it. The “getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap” comment from Arrington would make any legitimate journalist’s skin crawl. Yet, in the NYT story, Brian Lam of Gizmodo says, “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists? You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.”

Actually, there is no honor in printing unsubstantiated rumors, especially in this case, where the authors of the stories reporting the Apple-buying-Twitter rumor were themselves highly skeptical. It’s one thing to report a rumor if your investigation yields evidence to corroborate the rumor. It’s quite another to report it when even you yourself don’t believe it to be true and your investigation turns up nothing to suggest otherwise. What do journalists have besides rumors? Try investigation, research, and leg work. There is a huge space between merely printing press releases and passing on unsubstantiated rumors. During my career in newspapers, I heard about plenty of juicy rumors that my colleagues were privileged to that never made it into print because they could not find enough evidence to substantiate them. I myself worked on an investigative piece with another writer looking into a mother’s allegations of grade-fixing by her son’s high school principal and football coach. We spent a month conducting interviews and collecting evidence, and then, despite our objections, the story was spiked at the last minute because the brass felt there wasn’t strong enough evidence and the source of the allegation was rather shaky (the mother then went to the local TV station, which ran a story on far flimsier evidence than we had compiled, but that’s another story for another time). So excuse me if I say that anyone who believes a journalist’s options are to either print unsubstantiated rumors or merely copy press releases has no clue what it is to practice journalism.

Attitude Toward Printing Rumors

In 2000, I was a junior at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and working part-time in the sports department of the Durham newspaper, my hometown paper and the closest professional daily newspaper to Chapel Hill. UNC’s basketball coach, Bill Guthridge, had resigned, and the ensuing coaching search was the big story of the summer for the local media. The first choice, of course, was Kansas’ Roy Williams, who had long been considered Dean Smith’s handpicked successor to inherit the program. And of course, as with any high-profile coaching search, there were plenty of rumors flying around.

I got back from vacation in early July and ran into some people I knew from the UNC student paper. They asked me, “So what happened at your paper?”

Having been out of the loop for a couple weeks, I asked, “What do you mean?”

Well, turns out the paper had run an A1 story with a banner headline proclaiming: Williams says “Yes” to Tar Heels. Unfortunately, later in the day on which that story ran, Williams told a giant crowd in Kansas that he was staying at KU. From what I gathered in the years after the fact, here’s what happened: Our UNC writer happened to be out of town when the rumor came down that Williams was going to take the job after his visit to UNC. So another writer in the department, a veteran who had covered ACC basketball for decades, stepped in, talked to some sources, and wrote a story saying Williams has agreed to take the UNC job. I’ve read the story several times since that incident (unfortunately I can’t access the archive to link to it), and half the story was actually spent warning that Williams has been known to change his mind before and that it is not uncommon for coaches to have a change of heart after verbally accepting a job. Of course, the “Williams says yes” headline pretty much trumped all of that, and our paper instantly became famous all around the country for all the wrong reasons. There were even copies of that day’s edition on eBay. And as you can imagine, the paper heard no ends of complaints and ridicule for quite a while, becoming a target in many a “the media just makes up stuff” rant.

(On a personal note, after seeing how much back-and-forth Williams went through before deciding to come to UNC in 2004, I still strongly suspect that he changed his mind at the last minute in 2000.)

In the aftermath, the writer of the story, a well-respected sports journalist in the realm of ACC basketball, was essentially demoted from the top sports beat at the paper to cover a lesser school. There were discussions within the newspaper and in the local media about the ethical questions in the incident — in short, a lot of navel-gazing.

So why did I share this story? To underscore the difference in attitude toward printing rumors. In the case of the UNC coaching story, the writer wrote a story with corroborating sources. The sources turned out to be wrong, and he was punished for it. In the case of Gawker and TechCrunch, they reported a rumor WITHOUT any corroborating evidence, and from the developments since then, it certainly looks like the rumor was false. Yet, there has been no acknowledgment of this on their part. There has been no punishment for the people who wrote those stories, as far as we know. And instead, they are justifying their actions, making no excuses for their practices, and are even getting support from some. Yes, everyone in journalism is likely to print some kind of rumor at some point, but how you view the ethics of that practice and whether you see it as a last resort or a standard MO does impact your credibility.

Tangent: A Matter of Different Audience Expectations

The reaction to this incident is a good illustration of why I wrote previously that I don’t believe the “This is the best we could do in the time we had, now you help us improve it” approach works for newspapers in the current climate. Imagine if, instead of Gawker or TechCrunch, it was the New York Times that had reported the Apple-Twitter rumor in that manner. I’m pretty sure the NYT would have been ripped to shreds by readers and media critics alike, probably some of the same critics who are now defending Gawker and TechCrunch.  The reason? Audience’s expectations and perception of each media company’s niche. The New York Times, like most traditional media entities, has defined itself as a source that delivers accurate, trusted news, whereas Gawker and TechCrunch have defined themselves as playing by a much looser set of rules when it comes to truth vs. expediency. That works out fine for Gawker and TechCrunch, and because they are defined this way in the eyes of their audience, they are able to say, “We are throwing this rumor out there, unsubstantiated. If you know something, tell us.” A traditional media company, however, cannot do that without appearing to have abandoned its values in the eyes of its audience. And whereas Gawker and TechCrunch can, at any time, decide to move closer to the likes of an NYT in their ethics regarding fact-checking and have their audiences see that as an improvement, the NYT cannot move in the opposite direction without its audience seeing it as a decline in the quality of the product. That’s why it’s not so much whether a traditional media company can adopt the “news as a process” approach, but rather whether it can convince its audience to allow it to do that by changing their expectations on what sort of information they should get, enabling the company to redefine itself without losing credibility.