What We’re Planning to Discuss on 6/24
Do big publishers get a pass on sourcing? We’re not the only ones wondering. The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray this week faced a version of this very question in an interview with Aaron Task of Yahoo! Finance Tech Ticker.
Task questioned WSJ’s thin sourcing for the Journal’s story about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant. Murray responds by calling for, of all things, trust. “Sometimes you are in situations you are simply not allowed to tell where you got the information, at that point you have to trust us. We’re The Wall Street Journal. We wouldn’t be putting this on our front page if we didn’t think it was true.”
The Journal’s history of accurate reporting gives Murray the right to make that statement. Nevertheless, we wonder if “trust us” is a reasonable answer anymore, given the tectonic shifts in publishing. Should we really trust the big news entities like the WSJ, just because they tell us to? Or for that matter, do we trust the big book publishers when they publish a memoir as fact? Some have turned out to be fiction.
How much do reputation and tradition matter when stories break and evolve in Twitter time? Enough to give big publishers the occasional pass on sourcing? Join us tonight at 8:30pm EST to discuss this and more.
