Cutting Corners

Saturday afternoon I was sitting in front of the computer at the Missourian sports desk. It was around 3 or 4 and I had been in the newsroom since 11 that morning. Earlier that afternoon, I had finished writing a feature story on swimmer Micheal Phelps. I still had another story to finish writing before I could leave, and I really wanted to leave the newsroom by around 5. I wasn’t covering the Missouri Grand Prix, where Phelps was competing that night, for the paper. But, I had been researching the event and talking to swimmers all week, and I felt somewhat attached to it. I wanted to go just to watch, as an interested spectator, not a journalist. I was frustrated as I searched the internet for biographies on Phelps. We wanted to run a graphic listing Phelps’ gold medals in the 2004 Olympics with the days they were won, what events, the winning times, etc. When I was researching my story, I found a bio on Phelps on the official website for USA Swimming. I wrote down much of the info we wanted for the graphic, but didn’t have all of it. The problem was, the bio section of the USA Swimming website was down that day. As I searched for the info I came across Phelps’ bio on Wikipedia. It had a chart of the six gold medal wins in 2004 with all the info we wanted. It matched all the info I had gotten earlier, and I was pretty certain that it was all correct. But, still, it was Wikipedia. Needing an official source, I spent quite awhile reading biographies and coming up empty. Finally, I found a list of all Olympic winners in 2004 from the official Olympics website, browsed through for the events Phelps won, and sent it on to the graphics department. I didn’t get out of the newsroom until 6 that day. I missed the swimming events, and Phelps broke a world record, I was disappointed that I missed it, but at least we ran a graphic sure that we had the accurate information.

I bring this up because I think it demonstrates how easy it is to use technology to cut corners these days. If I had been a huge swimming fan and was determined not to miss the competition that night, I may have simply relied on the information from Wikipedia. After all, I was pretty sure it was correct. There’s a dangerous line for journalists when it comes to information we get from the internet, and it’s pretty easy to cross it if it will save us some time in the newsroom. If we find something on a website that may not be reliable, but it sounds right, it’s easy to just trust it, plug it into our stories, and leave.

It’s scary to think that I could go into Wikipedia, throw in some false information, and some fellow writer could come across it before it’s edited out, take it as fact, and include it in a story. The abundance of information sources out there makes our lives as journalists a lot easier, for sure, but it also makes cutting corners way too easy. Thus, one of the most important tasks for journalists today is to not be lazy, to not cut corners just because we can, to spend the extra time to validate facts and information. After all, even if we do have to spend a little bit of extra time fact-checking, we still have it easy compared to the journalists who came before us. A writer writing a similar story on Mark Spitz’s 7 gold medals in 1972 wouldn’t have had the internet to find the information the way I found it. They wouldn’t have been able to find the background info prior to an interview which helped me ask the right questions to get the right answers that led to a good feature story. I can’t even imagine a newspaper running smoothly without the internet. Obviously, there had to be other places to get facts before the internet, or newspapers wouldn’t have existed. But, I’m sure it took a lot longer to make phone calls in order to fact-check every little detail about a person or an event.

It’s great not to have to spend as much time researching these days. It allows us more time to get out of the newsroom, to find interesting stories and interesting people. It gives us more of an opportunity to focus on our writing and our storytelling abilities. Simply put, it allows for us to write more stories, and to write better stories. Just don’t trust Wikipedia.