GregoryBowers.com

Twitter proving for us, yet again, that news outlets are more focused on “scooping” their competitors than fact checking.

Background: There was a random, unannounced fireworks display over Seattle this evening. I didn’t see/hear it up here in Fremont, but apparently most of the rest of town did. No one was entirely clear why the display was going off. My boss, Dave Schappell, utilizing his talent for snarky remarks that don’t translate well in text (and often enough in person, unless you know him and expect it), tweeted the following:

Seattle fireworks are for @TeachStreet profitability event - go hypergrowth go!http://www.TeachStreet.com :-)

Allow me to break this down for you: While TeachStreet is growing and doing reasonably well, we’re still a startup. We get paid like start-up employees. Our last company event involved getting beers and shuffleboard at a dive bar. Our work furnishings are second (and sometimes third) hand IKEA products. We have 8 people in our fancy “World HQ.” The air of sarcasm about wealth in our office is palpable. So the thought of us putting on a fireworks display is ludicrous. Also, Dave posts a fair amount of snark intweets (and STS emails, blog posts, etc.). We all do. We are startup culture. Our HR department is named Daryn Nakhuda.

Within minutes, Dave tweeted that he was kidding, that he expected (also somewhat facetiously) that the fireworks were for the newly-Google-acquired Picnik. However, an overzealous tweeter for local NBC affiliate KING5 (seriously, how do you get a job doing that? Sounds awesome.) retweeted Dave. And as we all know, if someone, especially an organisation of some sort, tweets something, it’s instantly true.

Suddenly, the tweets were flying about, explaining the fireworks show as a TeachStreet celebration. The dangerous nature of a tweet (and especially a RT) is the complete lack of context it carries. Another local station, KIRO, did the legwork of actually checking with Dave (which I’m guessing involved just checking his Twitter feed to see he’d followed up discounting what as said), and went to the trouble of finding out the show was actually part of Farmer’s Insurance celebration of their 100th anniversary.

It kills me to think that a news outlet would take something so flip and detached as a tweet as a proper source. I followed up with a tweet built largely on the same components: attribution of events to some promotion or celebration, followed by a link that contained no corroborating information.

To whit: http://twitter.com/gb/status/10108626165

Sadly, that tweet received far less attention than a reply to Nick about the whole situation, which mentioned my simplified-for-140-character-limit thoughts of KING5’s move (I called it “stupid” instead of my original “fairly insipid”), where the KING Tweeter-in-Chief threw up his/her hands and said “I guess I just trusted him!” (here, lest someone doubt).

Let’s get this straight: we’re becoming a society that checks their twitter stream for the latest news. There is no denying that; why else would all the local stations bother setting up twitter accounts and paying people to tweet and retweet? But let’s take a step back. If the same thing were to happen 40 years ago, if a newspaper or TV news broadcast blurted out groundless gossip and overheard tidbits the reporter heard on the subway or at the water-cooler, would the reporter have any credibility afterward? Would Walter Cronkite have explained LBJ’s death as caused by a case of chicken-pox because he overheard someone say that before going on air? Of course not. Would he have just thrown up his hands and said “Oh, I guess I just trusted the guy who was making a new pot of coffee in the break-room”?

Now, with that thought in your head, I heard the cure for baldness, cancer and inability to dance is hiring my fiancée… just trust me on that.