Even TV stations are being swept into immediate postings
on the Internet, at times without a reporter being checked by an editor,
resulting in a lot of factual errors, bad grammar and less-reliable
single-source stories.
“That stuff just kills your credibility,”
said Graham Rayman, a Village Voice investigative reporter since 2007 who spent
11 years covering crime for Newsday.
For example: After the Dec. 14 school
massacre in Newton, Connecticut, errors got picked up, repeated and expanded.
It was days and weeks later before a clearer, accurate picture got to the
public.
Every citizen with a camera-phone is a
potential competitor to get it on the Internet or on the air first.
There’s fierce competition to be the first to
“feed the beast” of crime-news reporting in this age of tweets, Facebook and
phone cameras.
The days of waiting 12 to 18 hours later to
roll the information off the newspaper press is about as obsolete as the dodo
bird.
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