The Boston Marathon Bombing and the manhunt that followed taught social media users and legacy media that breaking news is not about being first, but it is about being right.
Even Twitter users started to question the reliability of stories during last week’s events.
@ironjanitor 19 Apr Ill go ahead and start the #conflictingstories #bostonmanhunt
@sarah_hinds76 13h Repulsed by every major news outlet. Where can I find the police scanner? #BostonManhunt #watertown
The Boston Marathon bombing has taught legacy media that they cannot compete with crowd source reporting. Legacy media needs to learn to work in tandem with social media and to create more factual stories rather than reactionary stories. Not everyone who tweets reports the news– they are transmitters of information. Everyone who has a smartphone allows people to become instant recorders of events. People can take pictures, record videos, Tweet, and post to Facebook.
Legacy media organizations have smartphone applications that allow citizens to upload their pictures and videos to their newsroom. Many people at the Boston Marathon did not set out to become journalists. They became accidental journalists who just happened to be at the right place at the wrong time to gather information. In most circumstances, a news reporter would most likely have arrived after the news event happened. We get present information instead of past information.
What happened between social media and legacy media is an interesting case study that will allow researchers to understand how we can create a better relationship between social media users and the legacy media to bring factual stories to a reactionary world.
As the Christian Science Monitor writes:
Now the media just need to be more careful about making those calls. After all, most tweeters and texters do not consider themselves journalists, but rather part of a community of people sharing important news. So the news media need to remind itself “to be more careful, and that being right is more important than being first,” says Janet Johnson, (clinical) assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas.
New media has raised new questions, she says via e-mail: “How can social media and legacy media work together to create a more factual story for the general public? How can police use social media as a tool to help identify criminals quickly? How can we educate the public on social media literacy in times of tragedy?”
While the tools are new and the methods viral, these questions are merely fresh incarnations of challenges that have existed for years. Richard Jewell was falsely accused of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996, and former Labor Secretary was acquitted in a fraud case in 1987.
“After being exonerated, Donovan rhetorically asked reporters, ‘Where do I go to get my reputation back?’ ” says Len Shyles, a professor of communication at Villanova University in Philadelphia, in an e-mail. “Churchill said it well: A lie travels around the globe before the truth gets its pants on.”
