When is quick too quick?

I'll always remember something my now-late grandfather told me when I used my cell phone at family get-togethers. No, it wasn't "Who gets more money: The girl or the phone company?" or "What, looking for love?" Instead, he asked a simple question — "Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier?"

Well, it does, I would always reply.

"Then why does it seem those things usually (foul) things up for everybody?"

I never was able to give my grandfather a satisfactory answer. He died two years ago next month but his question about me and my old brick of a cell phone is applicable to ethics. It seems that the more technology people have, the easier it is for people to (foul) things up. But, it is also easier for people to fix when they have (fouled) up.

A good example of this is something I experienced exactly a week ago. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon and everybody that I knew was eager to start their weekend. Unfortunately for those on the cops and courts beat and the MU men's basketball beat, Mike Anderson Jr. had to go and get arrested for DWI the night before. This meant, at least I felt, a lot of extra work and time so the Missourian could have an online-only story, probably one that few would read.

So, after requesting and obtaining a phantom press release from the MU athletics department, my co-writer and I sat down with an editor at the Missourian to get this little piece of news online. The editor read through it a couple times, shifted a comma and so forth, and got it put online. I thought it was a job well done for me and my new, one-time writing partner. We got some news, got confirmation, and put it online.

The story we put online, however, wasn't exactly correct. The main facts weren't wrong, but there were some errors that, at least to me, were glaring.

Either a detail about the crime was wrong, or somewhat embarrassingly for me personally, a stat about Anderson. Being the perfectionists we are at the old MIssourian, my writing partner and I kept making changes to the online story. While we making the story as factually correct as possible, we didn't note anywhere that we continued to alter the story while it was online. There was no "This story has been corrected" tag at the bottom or anywhere else.

And I feel, there should have been.

Let's say you're Mr. Henry Rowengartner of Columbia and you look to DIGMO.com for breaking news about your home city. You see that Mike Anderson Jr. has been busted for a DWI but you read the first version only. That version, it turns out, was not fundamentally wrong but had one or two minor problems. If you're Mr. Rowengartner, wouldn't you like to be able to go back to DIGMO and see that the version of the story you read was not entirely correct? Or at least check for updates and see that the old version was wrong?

In short, by just fixing the errors without telling anybody on the website, it feels like the Missourian is just covering up its mistakes. While that won't lead to Nixonian type troubles for the Missourian, it does set a bad precedent. It's a precedent that says, "Yeah, we can screw up online but we can just fix it and nobody will tell anybody and we'll just pretend we're the perfect little daily we aren't even close to being." Or something like that.

If I remember my J1100 lectures correctly, and there's a chance I don't, isn't something mentioned about the credibility of the news industry? If there was something mentioned, I believe the point of the lecture would be for the journalist and paper in question to try its hardest to be factually correct. And if it isn't, then shouldn't the institution making the error say that it was wrong?

I don't think that going on-line has made this less important. It does make this more difficult, though.

When we were writing this article, that turned out to be less than 5 inches, we kept being told by our editor that we wanted to keep up with the Trib. That meant we were in a rush we wouldn't have been in the past. In the past, we would have been able to just take our time, proof the thing a little closer, and put it in the paper the next day. That era, though, is gone. Now, it's all about speed. And accuracy can't be forgotten.

The real conflict I see with ethics and journalism comes with that desire for speed. When one paper gets anything before its competition, it just seems like it will put it online without checking the accuracy or even the newsworthiness. And this is dangerous for the public, especially when they depend on us to tell them what is going on. If two papers have conflicting stories, that hurts the public more than the eventual loser paper. In short, technology has made everything in journalism a race. And unless you are a perfect reporter with perfect methods and ability, you will eventually screw up when against the clock.

Then, it's up to the newspaper to tell people you've screwed up. If we're not going to get it right, that's probably the least we can do. And when we do (foul) things up, we have to tell people.