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Was the Fake Steve Jobs Health Report a Failure for Citizen Journalism?

by Terrence O'Brien on October 7, 2008 at 06:17 PM

Fake Steve Jobs Report, An Embarrassment for the Media? Some jerk sent the interwebs into a tizzy and Apple stock prices into a free fall Friday when he used CNN's iReport citizen journalism site to spread word that Steve Jobs had suffered a massive heart attack. Unfortunately, the multitude of blogs that repeated the rumors of Jobs' heart trouble failed to do any basic fact checking and as it turns out Steve Jobs was not rushed to the hospital.

Some media outlets jumped on false report as evidence of the failure of citizen journalism. Even some new members of the "new media" like ReadWriteWeb, a technology focused blog, claimed that false reports like this not only hurt the reputation of citizen journalism as a concept but also of iReport's parent company CNN.

Of course, all claims of the failure of this reasonably new reporting method are so glaringly out of touch with reality and reasonable expectations. The concept of citizen journalism applies the same principles to news reporting that as the open source movement and community-powered Web sites like Wikipedia apply to software and online encyclopedias, respectively. By relying on input from the public, the hope is to get quicker and more intimate access to breaking news. Of course, some will try to game the system, just as they do on Wikipedia, but these few bad apples do not decrease the overall accuracy beyond that of traditional outlets.

What failed on Friday was not citizen journalism, but plain old traditional journalism. Those media outlets that failed to take a critical eye to initial reports and outlets that sensationalized the story in the aftermath are the ones who failed. Responsible citizens and journalists shouldn't believe everything they see on CNN, much less everything they see on its "unedited, unfiltered" YouTube-like community Web site. [From: paidContent.org]

Tags: apple, citizen journalism, CitizenJournalism, cnn, ireport, journalism, media, steve jobs, SteveJobs

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