I was at a conference yesterday when one of the presenters said that “85% of journalists begin their research online”.

While I couldn’t actually find this statistic repeated anywhere, looking for it I did find some stats that I thought were interesting.

Some quick stats:

Some more reading on this if you’re interested:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/32987/
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/04/02/more-journalists-using-facebook-and-twitter

This got me wondering… Say you were a disgruntled customer and you decided to post some false information on a user controlled information source such as Wikipedia. You could really say anything you wanted as long as it fitted in with the article and was a hard point to disprove without proper investigation.

Then imagine a rushed journalist (for a semi-credible news site) read this tidbit in the Wikipedia article and, without doing their research, decided to include this in their own article. Already this is sounding pretty nasty right?

Right, but what if then you modify the Wikipedia article to refer to the then published article as it’s reference point… Suddenly you would have a much more legitimate sounding piece of information, which more credible journalists might start writing articles based on, and the cycle continues.

Incredible, right? I looked further into it and it turns out this happened before.

A Dublin University student, Shane Fitzgerald, actually carried out an experiment where he fictitiously attributed a quote to Maurice Jarre on Wikipedia after his death. A few news sites picked it up initially (as the Fitzgerald expected) but it culminated with some very “credible” sources actually publishing his quote in newspapers! It was only brought to light when Fitzgerald himself removed his quote and informed these papers and news sites that the information was falsified. Apparently many sites haven’t even corrected this error, and so this quote will probably continue being incorrectly attributed to poor Maurice.

You can read more about it here, and about how other industries are experiencing this same problem.

I’d love to hear any journalists thoughts on this topic!