The world turns, and another spring is upon us. The seemingly interminable Boston winter is giving way at last to warmer weather, and as the ice recedes, Tufts students' thoughts increasingly turn to that annual fixture on the Tufts social calendar: Spring Fling.
Every year, April's approach gives rise to widespread speculation about who will be performing at Spring Fling. Inevitably a few apocryphal suggestions get repeated enough that some students become convinced that David Bowie or someone similarly out of Tufts' price range will be playing on the Hill. When a more accurate picture emerges, it is usually because The Tufts Daily breaks the news.
This can be a contentious move on the Daily's part, as the students on Concert Board, who do the work of choosing and booking the bands, feel that the Daily is pre-empting their right to announce the bands themselves. So reporters typically have to circumvent the Concert Board to determine the Spring Fling acts. This year, Matt Skibinski followed a Last.fm post listing rapper Asher Roth and Tufts band The Gentlemen's Bet as performers. He posted the information on The Hill, the Daily's blog for campus news, and sent out a Twitter.com feed. He updated the blog a few days later once a press spokesperson for Roth confirmed the show.
Despite complaints the Concert Board may raise, I think the staff of the Daily is simply doing their job in this situation. As an organization, the Concert Board's function is to help select musical acts and facilitate the logistical aspects of a concert; as an organization, the Daily's function is to report news that is relevant to Tufts students in a timely fashion. The information about who will play Spring Fling is not personal — its release would not be inimical to anyone's reputation and would not put anyone in harm's way. So it seems that the Daily's ethical obligation to inform overrides any ethical obligation to give the Concert Board priority in releasing the information.
The Daily's situation is different from that of most professional newspapers because the Daily has a monopoly on developing news on campus. Whereas major metropolitan newspapers are competing with other newspapers to be the first to break a given story, the closest thing to a rival for the Daily is The Tufts Observer, whose weekly news cycle and newsmagazine format makes for less time-sensitive content.
Still, there is an analogous set of concerns for the Daily's writers and editors to bear in mind. Within the race to turn a story around, speed must be weighed against accuracy; I would hope that getting the story right is valued above getting the story first. But as the Internet accelerates the rate at which news is reported, with that photo of Michael Phelps hitting a bong only a click away regardless of the publication that is carrying the story, I fear that small errors or unverified information, which would usually be filtered out through a longer process of editorial review, could get lost in the scramble.
Again, although the Daily's situation is different, there are certainly situations in which the editorial board has to make a decision about what is or is not ready for the next day's paper. Last semester, I was working on a piece about some Tufts students who faced expulsion because of allegations of drug dealing. Although both the administration and the Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) had been tight-lipped so far, we suspected that an official press release was forthcoming.
Journalism is often referred to as the first draft of history, and if you are the first to set down a description of an event, this lends some measure of credibility to your version (just ask Al Gore). Fearing that we would cede this authority, my editor asked if I could produce a shorter piece with only the bare facts. I had my reservations about how well sourced and thoroughly fact-checked my information was but I wrote up what I had, and the next day we led with the story.
As it turns out, I got several things wrong. The next day we ran a correction and the full story, but the damage was done. The Daily's reliability was weakened, and we had unjustly printed false information about the accused students. These were not the types of errors that a copy editor can catch. They were based on my own negligence and the fact that we were simply too hasty.
Skibinski wisely established the tenuousness of his sources in his initial post about Asher Roth and The Gentlemen's Bet, writing that the information was "according to an unconfirmed Last.fm post" and giving the caveat "if the posting is correct" before continuing. He followed up on it by getting confirmation from someone with more than hearsay knowledge of the situation.
The repercussions of printing inaccurate information vary from situation to situation, but the underlying ethical considerations remain the same. The media's paramount task is to inform. If in their haste to get the story journalists disseminate information that is imprecise or just plain wrong, they have fundamentally undercut this project.
