mark’lectic

Five Things to Look for in Online Media

May 12, 2005 – 8:24 am

I’ve been following the SCO vs IBM/Novell/RedHat lawsuits pretty closely.

I’m struck be the quality of early reporting on this story. The number of articles I’ve seen that are misleading or just flat out wrong is incredible.

I’m not just talking about obscure points of law either. Some of the stories get the basic facts of the case wrong, like what the various parties are actually suing for.

In all this, I’ve noticed a couple of things about online news websites that you should look for when deciding how much to believe. When reading an article, ask yourself these questions:

• Do they have a name associated with the article?
• Can you actually send an e-mail to the journalist who wrote it?
• Can you, at least, send an e-mail to the editor of the article?
• Is there a date that the article was published?
• Do they quote more than one source or sources with opposing viewpoints?

If you can answer yes to all five of those questions, consider bookmarking that site. It’s probably run by professional journalists who aren’t afraid to stake their reputation on what they write.

If you can’t; if the site only lets you fill in some comment form submitted to who-knows-who, or even worse, the only e-mail address you can find is for “webmaster@…”, don’t bother reading the article. It’s probably not worth the bits is magnetized on.