Balancing Speed with Accuracy

AP Reprimands Reporters

Social media platforms have made access to information easy and instantaneous. The shift away from traditional print journalism means that people aren’t turning to major newspapers to get their news. Breaking information is likely going to be discovered through social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter where the information can be delivered quickly and effectively to a large audience.

But what happens within a news organization when the actual reporters share breaking information on Twitter before it can be vetted by the editors? An incident just this week illustrates the fine line one must balance between the desire to communicate information quickly to a large audience and the need for accuracy of news reporting. Apparently, some journalists from the Associated Press down at Occupy Wall Street tweeted about some of their colleagues being arrested, sharing the news via Twitter instead of with the AP wire. This is in violation of the AP’s social media policy that news be first delivered to the AP and sent through the wires before being spread on social media platforms—another good reason why an organization needs a clearly worded social media policy.

Some counter that this is just an indication that the AP wires need to move faster to keep up with information. But how much faster can it really get without sacrificing fact checking, a basic staple of a journalist’s job? As the world of information moves at increasing speeds, we can strive to keep up, but there must be some limits imposed on those employees of trusted news organizations to maintain a certain standard of accuracy. There will always be somebody on the street with a smart phone that will tweet and update his or her status with the latest news before the news outlet gets to it. It should be the news organization’s job to ensure correct, accurate, factual information.