Rushing to be wrong

Jacobi has been "let go" by CBSSports.com:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/campusrivalry/post/2012/01/cbssportscom-writer-adam-jacobi-fired-joe-paterno-death/1

 

Kind of funny/sad CBS made Jacobi the scapegoat.
They should fire the bosses who don't believe their bloggers need editors.
CBS' idea of speed over accuracy burnt them here (one AME tweeted how the Paterno death story was their most read page that day), but sure, go ahead and throw the blogger under the bus.

 

That's hardly throwing him under the bus.

The guy reported, without attribution, that Joe Paterno was dead. It was wrong, and his "source" turned out to be a tweet from a student website.

That's a gots-to-go situation. I feel bad for the guy, but his fuckup became a major embarrassment to his employer. He absolutely had to be fired, and it sounds like he knew it.

 

He absolutely needed to be edited.
Among the policy changes CBS is considering, that will be the first.
I can't say I edited every blog entry, but my guys knew they better call if the entry involved sources or could be perceived as controversial.
We also didn't break news in blogs, but that's another discussion.

 

Firing Jacobi is an interesting situation. I know of Jacobi a little bit, and he's not a trained journalist per se, and he's not alone in the CBS Sports blogging stable. Their threshold for sourcing is often very low, and in this case, it came back to burn the author and web site.

 

There are a lot of eggs on a lot of faces caused by this.

Our local CBS affiliate ran a crawl announcing Paterno's death. It has an iPhone app and sent a push notification announcing at as well. When the story was retracted, there was no crawl or iPhone alert.

 

So the next time a network anchor reports an inaccurate item, he/she should be canned, too, right?

 

I can tell you this -- if a network anchor went on the air and announced Joe Paterno is dead with no attribution, just a statement of fact, and the person who made the call to report it did so based entirely on one tweet from a student website, the person who made the call to report it should absolutely be canned. No question. And I say that as a TV news producer who has had to make this sort of decision. If I reported Joe Paterno's death based on the OnwardState.com tweet and it turned out to be false, I absolutely should be fired.

The network anchor isn't a straight-up comparison, because in most cases the anchor is not the one making the decision to report the story. In this case it was apparently Jacobi's call and it was Jacobi who fucked it up. Again, I feel terrible for the guy. I don't know him and I don't know his work outside of this, his lowest point professionally. But that was a fuckup you just can't make.

 

When's the last time an anchor for most stations wrote their own scripts? I don't know where the approximate cutoff is for market size in determining whether producers or the on-air talent write the newscast.

 

It's fairly unusual in larger markets. Generally they're tweaking someone else's work to fit their delivery, as opposed to writing the whole thing on their own.

I know Scott Pelley serves as Managing Editor for the CBS Evening News, and I get the impression he has a lot of say in what's covered in the newscast, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's writing much of it. (He may, though -- since the network broadcasts rely so heavily on correspondents, there really isn't much to write for the anchor.)

As for market size, I can tell you when I worked in a market sized 120+ many years ago, the 5pm anchors didn't write much, but the 11pm and weekend anchors wrote their whole shows. In a top 15 market now, the anchors rarely write, apart from the weekend anchor, who will write a few things each show.

One notable exception to all of this: the ESPN SportsCenter anchors, who write all their own stuff.

 

Situations like this are bound to occur these days in cases of ongoing, soon-to-occur news, and I'm not sure firing somebody is always the way to go.

If this had been a newspaper, with a set deadline and a stop to the news day, then premature, too-quick responses are less excusable. With a blog, the whole idea, and practically the only purpose, is to be quick, and preferably to be first, or as close to first as you can, with any news.

What if Jacobi had reported that Paterno had died, and he actually had done so, but still no sourcing was offered in the story? Would Jacobi have been fired? What if he'd put it out there, and he (and Onward State) had been right? Would anybody have even cared that he just put something out there, with no attribution?

No, he would have been being credited with breaking the news, and heck, probably promoted. But, still, journalistically speaking, it would have been shoddy, unattributed work.

This makes me think that Jacobi was probably fired more over cbssports.com's embarrassment, or perhaps fears of possible legal issues with the Paterno family than because of a journalistic shortcoming in his story.

I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here because, as I said, I'm just not sure someone always has to be fired, even for an egregious error, especially one that turned out to absolutely correct a short time later and it turned out people were essentially and literally just waiting for it to happen. This seems something that perhaps Jacobi, cbssports.com, and frankly, the whole industry, could have taken note of, learned and grown from in terms of responsibility, professionalism and the chains of command and editing rules in the media's new, faster-moving world of today, and all could have been the better for it from this point forward.

Now, it remains to be seen whether any of that will happen because I'm sure we'll be encountering more of these types of situations.

I have a feeling this was probably a painful discussion all the way around for everybody at cbssports.com. I, for one, would have liked to have been a fly on the wall.