Imagine watching a movie in fast-forward. No pausing, no rewinding, no slowing
allowed. This is how you now must live. You must absorb all information in half the time and
respond to it likewise. Think fast, act now, or get left behind.
Electronic media has thrown today’s world into fast-forward. No longer does a
newspaper have until the next morning to research a story. On Twitter, it may not even have
until the next hour. The audience expects information — and, in 2013, it expects it now. We
complain if, within a few minutes of a breaking event, a Google search comes up empty. We are
suspicious when our Twitter feed refuses to satisfy our appetites. We scrutinize Facebook for
others who know more than we. By the time any printed articles appear, many of us are already
aware of the details.
The sacrifice to speed, of course, is accuracy. I discussed this issue briefly on March 18,
(“The catch-22 of rapid reporting”), but events of this week compel me to return to it anew. The April 8 ABC dorm scare provoked a bullet-fire series of tweets by The Cavalier Daily that had online readers reeling with frustration. Several responders accused the paper, after the fact, of
propagating the rumor by reporting it as breaking news.
Let’s deconstruct the timeline of that fateful Monday.
At 2:08 p.m., The Cavalier Daily tweets, “Breaking: Reports of randomized dorm
searches coming in.”
At 2:13 p.m., it sends out a call for information: “Contact us ASAP if you have any
details about the randomized #UVA dorm searches reportedly happening.”
The first concrete information comes 17 minutes later, at 2:30 p.m.: “#UVa housing and
res. life email to staff: ‘We have not been contacted by the police’ … Trying to contact police
now.”
At 2:32 p.m., The Cavalier Daily re-tweets Dean of Students Allen Groves:
“@cavalierdaily: BREAKING: Reports of randomized dorm searches coming in.” My office
knows nothing about this report, nor does UPD. Hoax?”
2:49 p.m. brings initial confirmation of this hoax: #UVA police say as far as they know
no University police are taking part in #UVAdormsearch,” a tweet confirmed by Charlottesville Police Lt. Ronnie Roberts at 3:21 p.m.
From lift-off to landing, the entire process expires fully in one hour and 13 minutes —
arguably only 39 minutes if you end on the first tweet denying any police search.
How many people were affected in those first 39 minutes? Enough to cause some panic.
Intermediate tweets show conversations exchanged with students alleging alcohol searches in
their dorms, The Cavalier Daily asking for witnesses and reporting students dumping alcohol.
@kimbrrlyclaire tweets at 3:22 p.m. “reliable journalism requires proof, not just
repeating twitter allegations.” Her tweet brings up a point: should that first 2:08 p.m. post have
occurred? The accuracy of reporting clearly improved a little with each tweet.
In this case, with five minutes more patience, that first authoritative-sounding tweet becomes tempered into one calling for response, but implying a lack of information to confirm. Waiting just 24 minutes reduces the hype through information from Dean Groves. Even adding the adjective “unconfirmed” before “reports” to that first tweet might have saved The Cavalier Daily some of the flack it received.
If The Cavalier Daily was in the process of contacting police and faculty for information,
why not tweet something to that effect first? Why risk reporting something as breaking? It
is possible the lapse results from a semantic assumption: “reports of” automatically implies
“unconfirmed”; unfortunately, readers are less likely to infer this negative than to believe its
allegation.
At the same time, the follow-up tweets so quickly defused the panic that it’s also worth
pointing out the paper’s success in immediately securing the answers to the reports it posed.
Articles released over subsequent days cover the story from multiple angles, helping to trace
the explosion of panic; the paper commendably retold the exact origin of the rumor April 9 in
“Personal prank panics student body.”
The ABC dorm search put The Cavalier Daily in a tough situation. So many people already knew of the dorm search rumors by word of mouth (or Facebook) that The Cavalier Daily likely only participated in already-created hype instead of producing anything new of its own. Yet, the automatic trust bestowed in a newspaper to provide accurate details places a greater onus of responsibility on it to decide which information to report, and how to report it. That first tweet caused more panic than needed, given just a few minutes more produced increasingly reliable information. In the days of online media, journalists tiptoe an electric fence. One wrong step and they are bound to receive an electric shock.
Ashley Stevenson is The Cavalier Daily’s public editor. Contact her at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com with concerns and suggestions about how The Cavalier Daily could improve its coverage.
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