CNN iReport Takes Hit Over ‘Fraudulent’ Steve Jobs Post
CNN’s iReport took a hit today over an early morning post claiming Steve Jobs of Apple had a massive heart attack. Apparently the story which was up for about three hours at this citizen journalism site, negatively affected Apple stocks.
Here is the CNN response to the story:
iReport.com is an entirely user-generated site where the content is determined by the community. Content that does not comply with Community Guidelines will be removed. After the content in question was uploaded to iReport.com, the community brought it to our attention. Based on our Terms of Use that govern user behavior on iReport.com, the fraudulent content was removed from the site and the user’s account was disabled.
An interview I conducted in July also challenged CNN iReport’s filtering. The interview entitled CNN iReport Superstar Tells All — Maybe Too Much contains this quote from iReport superstar Grayson Daughters:
The user can generate whatever they want to. It’s now up to the consumer to decide if they want to USE that media. Once you get into the user-generated realm, journalism ethics are going to very hard to apply to every user out there.
October 4th, 2008 at 9:41 am
This comment left on Silicon Valley Insider says it all:
“the steve jobs faked heart attack story is not a failure of ‘citizen journalism’. it’s a failure of CNN.”
— dsilverman about 13 hours ago
That said, no one ever pioneered jack sitting around doing nothing. Best thing I can think of is… always be prepared… for the ghosts in the machine. CNN could do far better patrolling of iReports, but no doubt they’re trying to do everything on the cheap, and not allocating the warm bodies behind the infrastructure needed to monitor the hallways. Try getting something with a pulse into your iReport to do some housekeeping. Since we can’t delete, thus control, our own conten there, once submitted, the place is looking like a college dorm on a Sunday morning. Very icky for this soccer mom’s sensibilities.
Still, and I’ll say this again… you don’t pioneer jack sitting around doing nothing. At least they’re trying, and they will learn the most from their mistakes. Let’s hope they keep iReport around to make lots of really good one. We watch, we use, we all learn that way.