Mike Wise of WaPo fakes story to make a point

I don't know. You would have to ask Mike Wise.

Just saying, if you're determined to do it, don't involve your readers. Still idiotic, either way.

 

The tweet is still there, if you want to follow along:

http://twitter.com/mikewiseguy


DC Bog summarizes the response:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcsportsbog/2010/08/mike_wises_twitter_hoax.html

 

It's different when someone from the Wash. Post reports this on Twitter than if a random guy under a random Twitter handle reports this.

Most beat guys I know will try to confirm most reports on Twitter. A lot of people will re-tweet it (and folks like PFT will write a few graphs), but beat guys will try to verify the info, too.

Wise was/is flat-out wrong here.

 

Hindsight being 20/20, it probably would have worked better if he did not choose something so tangibly real. This could very plausibly be true, unlike Finch which had almost a fairy tale quality to it.

Following a false Tweet like Beyonce divorces Jay-Z and marries Clinton Portis in a crazy 24 hours or having Arrington in on a LaVarr and one of the Williams sisters elope Tweet could have "worked" just as well.

 

Is posting a "fake" tweet the same as faking a story?

It might be an interesting experiment to see who would take believable information from Twitter and run with it, but I wouldn't want any journalist working for me to do it.

One thing publications like the Post has over most bloggers and internetters is credibility. If you start messing with that, you aren't left with much.

 

Did we not already know - as of about 1999 - that the internet doesn't fact-check?

 

I'm constantly amazed how gullible people are willing to be.

 

If you are posting a Twitter update (cannot bring myself to use the word tweet) on an official work account (or one used for official newspaper business), then yes, it's akin to faking a story. Like it or not, people use Twitter as a news source. To pretend otherwise, or to wish it away because we don't like it, is to ignore reality. The trick is to use Twitter responsibly (yes, it can be done).

Of course, other sources should fact-check before running with a Twitter update as "breaking news." What's the old saying - if your mom says she loves you, ask a second source? But to put false information out there on Twitter to prove a point? That's irresponsible. And it reinforces the stereotype that people in the newspaper industry are fuddy-duddies who don't like or get the interwebs.

 

Probably erroneous reports about fires on The Mall and car bombs at the State Department ...

One thing I wonder is how the internet would be equipped to handle the kind of traffic it could not handle in 2001, with all the stripped-down news sites offering no more than the bare minimum of news because servers were overloaded. I assume that wouldn't be the case nine years later, but should I?

 

http://gawker.com/5626311/sports-columnist-cunningly-uses-twitter-to-prove-that-hes-dumb

 

Back in the early 1960s, a group of bored baseball writers at the winter meetings made up a preposterous rumor, the silliest they could think of, to see how long it would take to get back to them. The rumor? Yogi Berra would become manager of the Yankees, which then came true some months later.
There is a difference between that stunt and Wise's however. The writers didn't make their rumor public in any way. Intentionally putting out false information, no matter what your point might be (I think Wise had a good one, BTW) is in my mind a firing offense. Apparently, I am not operating by the same standards as the Washington Post.