Louis Gray & the Resurrection of Jared Fogel

I've been reading Louis Gray's blog a lot lately and I find him to be consistently thoughtful, original and accurate. His most recent post is about the tendency of people on Twitter and other social media to repeat rumors as if they were facts. This morning two usually reliable sources.  Mashable and Digg 's  Kevin Rose ran with the news of the death of Jared Fogel  from the Subway commercials.

Except that news of the death was about as accurate as an Elvis sighting. Louis makes the point that people should check their sources before publishing. Always good advice and the professional thing to do.

Except social media is filled with passionate amateurs who often Tweet with great speed during short breaks from whatever it is they do for a living. This is one of the primary reasons that it seems to me that social media practitioners are not structured to replace professional news gathering and distributing organizations.

Our advantage is that we have a great many feet on a great many streets in a good many global neighborhoods. Our disadvantage is that we lack the discipline and filters of traditional news organizations. My hope is the two can somehow braid their strengths together for the benefit of everyone.

Meanwhile, we social media practitioners should at least take the time to attribute where we got the information we republish so that those who care can consider the original sources.

Comments

[Ontario Emperor]

In this case, the system worked. I don't know when the original reports of the "Jared Remembered" website first appeared, but by the time I saw them and posted a link to the Snopes article, many others had done the same. So the same tools that spread the rumor were able to quash it. (I hope.)

[shel israel]

Excellent point, OE. We seem to have a post-publishing filter system that does work, but we need to error in public first.

[Adam Ostrow]

Just to be clear, Mashable didn't "run the news" of the death of Jared. I asked on my personal Twitter account: "Subway Jared Died?" Big difference.

[shel israel]

Adam,
You are absolutely right and I regret the error. I should have better checked my facts.

-Shel