socialmedian: Why We Published That Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report

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Why We Published That Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report

Source: Silicon Alley Insider

Oct 04, 2008

Summary

Around 9:15AM yesterday, we noticed that the lead story on CNN's citizen-journalism site iReport said that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the hospital after a heart attack. By the time we found it, the story had more than 100 Diggs and 50 comments and was all over Twitter. We didn't know whether the story was true, and we had no immediate way to confirm or debunk it. We viewed it as significant, however, both for those who care about Apple and Steve and as a first meaningful test of "citizen journalism."

We knew that our readers would want to know about the story and evaluate it for themselves. So we did what we did what we usually do in such cases: We published a post describing the iReport story and noted that, true or false, this was a big moment for citizen journalism. In our post, we said that we had no idea whether the story was true, that we were making calls, and that we would update the post the moment we knew more. We also reached out to Apple and CNN. As is always the case when you contact sources--especially corporations--we didn't know when or if

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Comments (1)

Nishith,

Oct 05, 2008

I think there was nothing wrong in reporting this story. They particularly mentioned "We're making calls, but as yet we have no idea whether it's true. Confirmation/denial the moment we get it." If some idiots want to buy/sell apple stocks based on this, alleyinsider can't be blamed for their stupidity.