Sent to you by khalil via Google Reader:
via OJR on 1/10/11
By Robert Hernandez: On Friday, December 13, 2002, I killed a man... a teenager really... but only for 15 minutes. I was a few months into my new job at The Seattle Times where I was running the homepage. The news broke that a 17-year-old teen was shot in the head by a Seattle police officer during an attempted robbery and the brief was sent my way to post. For some reason, I assumed a gunshot to the head was fatal and wrote the headline stating that the teen was killed. After getting rightfully chewed out by the reporter, I learned that you can survive that injury. More than eight years later, after hearing the news coverage and premature reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death, I can't help but be reminded of my error and the lessons I've learned. Throughout my career, I've heard people say that the Web – and now the real-time Web with social media – is a liability. A "tangled Web" of ethical problems. Let's just get this out of the way: Errors happen in journalism all the time and, for the most part, by accident. It doesn't matter what the medium is – pixels or paper, newswires or tweets – facts can be misled, misreported or misunderstood. Errors happened before the Internet. Errors happen in newspaper, radio and TV journalism. The bottom line is that errors happen. What matters, in my opinion, is what you do after they happen.Things you can do from here:
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