Brit makes Baltimore reporters look like gits

Healthy skepticism -- in blogging and in Big Iron reporting for a metro daily -- is a necessary tool to have at all times.

Take yesterday's YouTube embed, allegedly from Baltimore's tourism office, suggesting that Baltimore, the city, is safer than you'd think from watching The Wire on television.

My initial reaction was shock at the thought that someone in Visit Baltimore could make such a colossal mistake in judgment to sell the city on the stacked-up backs of the dead. But after a few minutes, and a second watching, my BS meter pegged. Nobody could possibly be that clueless, even in Baltimore.

Apparently, this makes me more skeptical than several reporters in town. The City Paper took the bait. And so did Peter Hermann of The Sun, who got snared by another piece of the same hoax, a fake Mayor's site.

It was all a hoax by british blogger Alex Hilton. Peter Hermann, to his everlasting credit, corrected his original and wrote at length about what happened.

I hate to say it but this all happened simply because of a Reporting 101 failure: neither reporter bothered to verify it.

When I saw the YouTube video yesterday morning, my second action (after sputtering an some unprintables) was to DM both the Visit Baltimore office and the person who manages their Twitter account and ask whether they had actually created the video. I asked at 8:06 a.m. and had my emphatic answers -- No! -- a half-hour later.

I was able then to change my blog entry  from "this can't possibly be real, right?" to a note that it was, in fact, a hoax.

The old newsroom saying was "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

If she says it on YouTube or elsewhere on the internet, that goes double.

More evidence that social media works

Susan Mernit -- another prolific and incisive writer that may not be yet be among the bookmarks of enough journalists -- shares a long excerpt of an even more exhaustive White Paper on how she and her team used social media to significantly raise awareness of the most recent Knight News Challenge.

In "Case study, using social media for social good: The Knight News Challenge 2008/09," Mernit shows, step-by-step, why you weren't imagining things when you thought that there was an awful lot of publicity about the Challenge this time around.

Click here for the rest of this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Thinking of the journalist as a DJ instead of a curator.

[caption id="attachment_388" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo by Thomas Hawk"][/caption]

Jeff Jarvis points to what may be a better analogy for the role of a modern journalist: A nightclub DJ.

Previously, I'd suggested journalists need to become a curator, but I agree that the messier, noisier role of a nightclub spinner is closer to what journalists do as they run toward constant deadlines, and serves as a less fussy example than curator. Elevator speech: changed.

The original article, in French, translates to something like this (thanks to my daughter Anna for helping Google with some of the idioms):

The job of the press is redefined by new technologies and new relationships with readers, listeners and viewers. The new journalist acts as a filter, a "packageur" of information produced by multiple sources and heterogeneous sources (other media, agencies, experts, witnesses, fans).

Information is no longer a product, it became a process, it is no longer an object it is a service and the media become facilitators. (This does not mean that the report or the investigation died, it simply means that this activity, extremely expensive, can no longer be their only activity. Exclusive content is a loss leader, a product for "the reputation...")

The whole article is here.