John Burke at Editors Weblog headlined his version of this item "The Online Journalism Challenge: Speed vs. Accuracy vs. Both." It's about media mistakes made under the "24/7 news clock" for broadcast news and wire services, not just online media.
Beginning: The BBC rushed an "industry expert" into a live studio to answer questions about the recent dispute between the music company and the computer company that both happen to be called "Apple." Unfortunately, the BBC staff member assigned to bring the expert in from the reception area found the wrong one of two guys named, "Guy."
The live-on-camera interviewer in the studio expected a computer magazine writer named Guy Kewney. (Kewney runs http://www.newswireless.net, which calls him "one of the UK's best-known high-tech writers and pundits." His picture is on the Web page for any reporter who had time for even a little background homework.)
What Burke points out is that the mistakes didn't stop there:
On Saturday May 13, The Guardian, as well as several other publications posted on their websites that the man who had been mistakenly interviewed, Guy Goma, was a cab driver. On May 15, Reuters posted the same story on its website. But
the following day, Reuters came out with the real story. Goma is a data
cleansing expert and was at the BBC for a job interview. "The mixup is
being blamed on a young, inexperienced producer," said the Reuters
video next to which was no correction on the previous day's story. The
Guardian's article also does not have a correction.
Kewney has his own version, saying Goma is a Business Studies graduate from the Congo who was in the BBC reception area waiting to be interviewed -- off camera -- for "a high level IT job with the BBC." The BBC's own correction says Goma was there being interviewed as a "data support cleanser." Other corrections say he is "an economist, who was there for an interview all right-- for a job as a staff accountant." The Times in London describes Goma as a computer programmer.
What bothers Burke -- and me, too -- is that some of the original, flawed, stories stayed online, with no corrections or links to the updated stories. Linkage is what the Web is about. Getting the facts straight is what journalism is all about. Online news sites should be putting the two together.
The other thing that bothers me is the fact that no story I've read tells just what a "data support cleanser" is -- and dozens of sites just kept parroting the phrase from the BBC. Maybe it's a personnel department truncation of "a job in the computer systems support department as a data cleanser." The Times's simple "computer programmer" may be specific enough for most readers, because it's possible that computer programming is involved in the job.
In a general sense, "data cleansing" is what those news reports needed: Fixing mistakes in gathered information. (Without "support" in the middle, Google has more luck finding information about what the general job category might be. )
In the computer biz, data cleansing can mean writing or running sophisticated software to get bad records out of a database. My unsophisticated mental model involves getting rid of typographical errors and incomplete or duplicate addresses in a 50,000-customer mailing list that I stuffed into a Compaq "luggable" computer for a software company PR department 20 years ago. (Maybe that number is off by a decimal point or two. This is from memory. But I do remember they were all supposedly happy customers.)
Maybe we could get news organizations to hire more fact-checkers and copy editors by calling them "news support data cleansers." Maybe not. They'd probably want higher salaries. But the best defense against flawed "news data" is still a good reporter asking intelligent questions... and following up answers with one more question: "How do you know?"
It's easy to feel sorry for the poor BBC underling who called out the name "Guy" in a reception area and got the wrong man by that name. At least at that point no assumptions were made about the man's profession based on his skin color or accent. It's not as easy to say the same about whichever reporter failed to say "how do you know?" to whoever "knew" Mr. Goma was a cab driver.
Back at Editors Weblog, Mr. Burke has a good cover-your-bases closing that goes for me, too: "Of course, if Goma turns out to have been working as a taxi driver
while looking for work in IT, that would make me look pretty foolish."
9:54:07 PM 
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