The flat answer is that while I’ve heard anecdotes I do not know, but I’m looking for an excuse to conduct some rigorous research into that question. In the meanwhile, here’s how I would think about whether to tweet or not. As in all things, professional judgment is required:

1. Is the information of immediate use to the audience, especially their safety? (Being useful is not the same as being immediately interesting, although that can also be something to consider.)
2. Is the tweet a discrete and complete piece of information? Tweets don’t have to tell both sides of the story, but they must be able to stand on their own without further context or explanation. They must have the relevant “who, what, when, where,” but probably not all of those. They almost never have “how” or “why”. (Although that’s just a guess. Another topic that is worthy of research.) Completed actions are probably the most likely pieces of information to be discrete and complete. And assertions by prominent people — “Newt Gingrich just said…” , for example — can certainly be tweeted in some cases, but they require more careful consideration:
   • Avoid tweeting anonymous assertions.
   • Is the assertion from the source about himself or herself? Or is about another person, or something the source purports to have seen?
   • Is the assertion opinion or is it asserted as fact? Assertions of fact require special care.
   • If a fact, how quickly are you likely to be able to confirm to the information with another independent source? Or, if an assertion, how quickly do you expect the other side to respond?
   • How well do you know and trust the source? Have they been truthful in the past? Are they in a position to know?
   • If the assertion turns out to be false, how much damage will be done to the audience? (Your reputation is always damaged if you report incorrect information.)
3. What is the competitive environment? If you don’t tweet it, is your audience likely to hear the news from a friend or another professional reporter or from the source directly? If you do tweet it, will it tip off competitors or sources and give them the chance to tell the story in an way that may be incomplete or inaccurate before you can get around to writing your own comprehensive article?

When journalists do tweet discrete facts before a full story is fleshed out, they can sometimes do it in ways that add context and whet appetites:

• Add context — and raise readers’ awareness of missing context — by describing why the fact caught your eye, and what else you plan to report.
• Invite questions about “tidbits.” Twitter is better if it is a conversation and not a lecture. Questions from readers via Twitter before an article is complete can help make your story more relevant.
• If a topic has a particularly high level of reader engagement, post that you’ll be offline to write, edit and fact-check your complete story.
• Tell your followers when and where they can get the complete story: “Film at 11.” (And, of course, deliver on every promise you make.)

Some people — most prominently Megan McArdle at The Atlantic — thought it just didn’t sound right.

The problem is that you can’t prove he didn’t say it. A couple of people have tried, and have come up with a good partial explanation. But disproving something you can’t see is nearly impossible. This is a great example of a problem often faced by reporters — a problem that’s becoming even more vexing with the development of social media. As it turns out, people say a lot of stuff that just isn’t true.

A quick Google search of the quote turns up more than 10,000 results — almost all from Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot or WordPress posts written since the death of Osama bin Laden. But as I try to teach my journalism students, popularity does not equal accuracy. Ten bad sources aren’t as useful as one good source. Google says that some date as far back as Feb. 1, 2001, but that may be a default date on the Tumblr micro-blogging platform. In any case, date-based search on Google is useless for this effort. (Similar searches on Bing and Technorati were also not effective.)

My favorite explanation, by tech writer Frederic Lardinois, points most of the quote to King’s 1963 book Strength to Love. He found that the one-sentence quote used on Twitter could also be found as part of a longer quote on other social media sites. Most of that quote — but not the first sentence — is directly from Strength to Love. But that first sentence remains a black swan. I can’t prove that King didn’t say it. But I can’t prove that he did. And I can’t figure out where or when in the contemporary digital folklore that the quote originated.  As a recently popular book points out, just because you’ve never seen a black swan doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Europeans had only seen white swans. Until a black one showed up in Australia in 1697.

Taken as an isolated incident he harm from this misquote is pretty abstract. At worst it becomes George Washington’s cherry tree — a story that everyone hears, that has its accuracy questioned, but that cannot be disproved. It muddies our understanding of history and it contributes to a changing narrative that we tell about ourselves, our history and our heroes.

The problem in the era of social media is that these misquotes are rampant and pernicious. Fabricating the words of political nemeses has become an acceptable and common tactic. Check out the archive of fact-checking that Snopes.com has done on fake quotes attributed to a variety of political lightening rods from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton. There is a library of fake quotes and fake legislation that gets distributed via e-mail and social networks. They’re complete fiction. It’s bad enough that political leaders — from Sarah Palin to Hillary Clinton — make up stuff all the time and assert it as truth. But it’s as if we’ve suddenly corrupted the value of the First Amendment by acting as if the answer to bad speech is not less speech but more bad speech. Lies are no longer combated by the often difficult-to-ascertain truth, but by more easy-to-fabricate lies.

It’s possible that the person — and it was one person — who decided to “upgrade” the actual King quote with an additional line was unconsciously mashing up King with another speaker. There’s plenty of historical precedent for that practice. Or perhaps she just incorrectly remembered the real quote and didn’t look it up in the book before she posted it to her blog. That happens all the time. I swear my wife told me to get chicken at the store yesterday. She swears she wanted me to get fish.

This happens all the time, and double-checking things that we “know” is probably the hardest habit for my reporting students to acquire. Good reporters — like good scientists — don’t care so much about what you know as they do about how you know what you know. We want to see it. I teach my students that “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” and I play for them a bit of Marvin Gaye — “believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear.”

The real problem for our nation is the intentional lies that are spread — and spread in a very smart way that adds to the malice of the act. My favorite is the YouTube video that shows Obama talking about “my Muslim faith.” Here’s the clip…. and here’s the whole clip. The 12-second clip — both totally accurate and totally incomplete — has been viewed nearly a million times. The full clip has been seen nearly two million times. But how many looked for the second after watching the first?

With the advent of democratic media distribution anyone can report what they see and hear. But who will look at the world around them and wonder what is unseen? And who will take the time not just to doubt, but to check it out?

Michelle Cerulli, a second-year MA student, told me this story and I encouraged her to blog about it. The short version is this: While attending a session about article comments, she watched a mild-mannered man use Twitter to quietly excoriate one of the speakers. This man didn’t stand up and confront or question the speaker in person. Instead he used this virtual soapbox to disagree with her — in what Michelle described to me as incredibly rude terms — about the role of comments on online news articles.

What was his beef with NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard? She was saying that online comments tended to be more vitriolic than you hear in “the real world.” His words on Twitter said that Shepard was wrong. But his behavior said that she was dead on. And, according to Michelle, he appeared to be oblivious to the irony.

And while this story so far might seem to some a perfect set-up for a conclusion in which I rail against online comments, that’s not where I’m heading. Online comments are important because it is there that our collective id gets revealed. Many of us reveal in anonymous or pseudonymous comments our fears and hopes n ways that most of us would deny if we were ever confronted with them. Online comments show how us — or at least some non-representative sample of us — experience the world in a way that we alienated from ourselves and the polite company around us.

And that unfiltered id — that alienated experience — is a happy hunting ground for a reporter who hopes to more clearly explain to his readers our increasingly complicated and interconnected world. The problem with comments is not that they are mean. The problem is that there are too few people mining them for hidden hopes and fears and too few people willing to patiently ask probing questions of the crowd.

More and more news organizations are hiring “social media producers.” I hope they’re given the challenge of not just distributing the news to the crowd, but also diving into it and finding individuals who are able to articulate why they’re much more scared, angry or jealous than they are willing to admit in a room full of their peers.

With a tweet early in the morning on Sept. 30, I promised to donate $1 to the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy for everyone who re-tweeted: “I use(d) the First Amendment at #uncjomc. http://ow.ly/2Fymp”

Here’s what happened:
* The experiment only set me back 30 bucks.
* Most re-tweets came within the first hour of my original post.
* I started the day with just under 900 followers on Twitter. Probably the biggest benefit to me was that I saw about a 1-percent increase in followers over the course of the day, which is an unusual increase for me — an infrequent and somewhat lackluster tweeter when I’m on deadline for various projects as I am now.

Thanks to …
@KristenELong
@alyssastep
@caseywelch
@amydobrzynski
@chris_coletta
@MECahoon
@julian_march
@kelly_poe
@EricaPerel
@RobbieCrowell
@whypickl
@amybugno
@kristennicole86
@dltowns
@KellyMcHugh
@jbhester
@staceface711
@JOMCParkLib
@hartzog
@mffawcett
@sarde
@uncstorylab
@highheeledmama
@michelekjones
@derigansilver
@bassman7625
@inongimke
@morgan_ellis
@CallMeMrKent
@danielbyrnes

And speaking of filters …

Google Releases Universal Search for Gmail, Docs and Sites I won’t be happy until it can find my keys and documentation of my that December 2003 expense report that accounting still hasn’t pushed through.

The future of UI Is VUI the new GUI?

Verizon Plans to Bring Live TV Streaming to the iPad The future of news is all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

FINDING THE MEDIATED CITY Durn, there’s a lot of words in this post. But whatever a mediated city is, I think journalists need to be at the center of creating it.

Auto-Tweeting Your Way to Spamsville Yup. Twitter’s about conversation. Not something you automate.

Broadcast Viewer Average Age: 51 Is it the device or the content that young folks don’t like?

The Web is not dead, but many wish it so
Too many words for me to sound them all out, but Steve Yelvington looks like he might have smart thoughts about the inflammatory Wired article.

It’s still about the journalism, not the CMS I will be so glad when people feel like they no longer have to build their own CMS. Can’t everyone just use Drupal, the most awesomest CMS that is way better than anything else and is used by all the cool kids? The partisanship just has to stop.

The Web Design Community Offers Advice To Beginners Quickly saw a line that I might turn into a t-shirt for class. “Google before you ask.”

Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2 I’m generally skeptical of anything in a box. They are usually operated with a turnkey and are bought at a one-stop-shop. But Statline’s good people. And the Good Lord knows we need more transparency at the state level.

Gannett Goes Hyperlocal With HighSchoolSports.net Wanna oust your local incumbent news organization? Publish a database of local crime, gossip about the schools and the scores and video from high school sports.

A fresh look at reporting skills Looks like Mindy McAdams has a good conversation going over at her blog. Need to stop in and check it out.

And finally a handful of posts that always draw my attention — ones that start with a number or an interrogative:

5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services

5 Questions with John Byrne of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Now, C-Change Media

10 Ways to Make Video a More Interactive Experience

NPR Listening By The Numbers—And The Platform

How Training Citizen Journalists Made a Difference

How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls

But I do want to bring you another attempt at headlines I’ve culled from my tech/social filters… and yet still don’t have time to read. Mashable and Romenesko still caught my eye the most this morning, but TechPresident and the PBS/Knight Foundation MediaShift IdeaLab (or whatever that very good site should be called) also added some variety to the mix.

So, without further ado. I filter these to you. Please filter them back to me.

15 Sites That Were Before Their Time GREAT reminder that what seems crazy today is often just ahead of its time…. and that a good idea doesn’t guarantee success… and that what’s hot today may soon be Friendster.

Evernote.com I haven’t tried it. But want to. Any tips?

Yahoo Mail Comes to the iPad, HTML5-Style If I were hiring a designer today, I’d want her to be pretty darn good with HTML 5. Am I right about that? Also, I need to know more about the idea of local caching with HTML 5. After all, for text updates you don’t really need to be always jacked in to the Internet. You just need to connect when you want to send or receive new information.

Share and Track the Story of Any Object with Printable QR Codes The “Internet of Things” and QR codes fascinate me. Wondering how/whether journalists should help “things” tell relevant and memorable stories to humans.

The Chrome Web Store Is Coming, and Google Has Big Plans for It Dear editors, if you would today like to watch your newsroom developers flip out walk over to their workspace this morning and ask them to stop work on the iPad app and start working on the Chrome Web Store App. … Then go over and tell your publisher that the Google Chrome Web will give you 95 percent of the revenue from selling your app, rather than Apple’s 70 percent. Please Twitpic the scene and share it with us, won’t you?

Why Facebook and Apple Will Win the Q&A War and Meet Swingly, This Year’s “It” Search Startup [INVITES] I wasn’t even aware that there was a ‘Q&A War’ being waged. But I’m glad to hear there is. Unfortunately, I suspect most news organizations aren’t winning this war that they should be. Durn it if the smart/crazy question isn’t one of the only tools that really differentiates professional reporters from hobbyists and advocates. I’d love to see a news organization develop a news FAQ site (SEO magic)… but with the purpose of helping their readers ask more precise and more probing questions of each other.

Journalist’s Resource: New site to help journalism educators Haven’t yet checked out Harvard’s new site. What are the highlights?

Groupon-ing is relatively low-risk for magazine publishers, but… Groupon strikes me as a great idea for news publishers. For me (and I think for lots of folks, especially young people), news is no good unless it’s a shared experience. I need other people in my geographic or behavioral community to be informed as well. I’d push hard to get a group-rate on a subscription — especially if the news service was optimized for mobile and social.

Ushahidi Builds Community with 3 L’s: Listen, Learn, and Leverage I can’t learn enough about Ushahidi. I’m coming back to this first-person-account whether you filter it back to me or not. Ushahidi is all the rage among new media funders and pontificators, but remains relatively unknown among U.S. journalists (pro and am). I fear that most people will eventually be introduced to it when something bad happens “because” of it — I fear the impending arrival of a moment in Ushahidi’s life akin to the Web’s “child-porn” Time magazine cover moment or Wikipedia’s “Arthur Schlesinger” moment.

Daily Kos, the Email Program Thirteen years later and I’m still waiting for a good place that tracks and reports on under-the-radar targeted phone/email/postal mail political messages.

Greene: CSU fosters love of print journalism What to say? What to say?

Increased mobile Internet access dims the ‘app revolution’ Am I crazy to argue that only half of the attractiveness of accessing the Net via phone is mobility? I’d argue that phones’ “instant-on” (and thus limited features) are at least as important in driving this trend. Dear manufacturers: What I want is a big screen, with a real keyboard that boots in under 15 seconds. And allows me to download about 150 MB/day. For $5 a month.

NC not featured on must-read Tweet list Dear homestate members of Congress: Twitter isn’t about talking. It’s about replying and asking. Do that and you’ll make the list. Or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.

Poll: 25% of Americans trust print news Look, trust is down almost across the board. The only institutions trusted by a majority of Americans are the military, small businesses and police. How can skeptical journalists get concerned if they’ve created a skeptical public? To me, here’s the most frightening sentence in the report: “Younger Americans also expressed more confidence than older Americans in several other institutions tested, including Congress, the medical system, and the criminal justice system, suggesting younger Americans are more confident in institutions in general.”

When a bomb threat ousted The Daily Tar Heel staff from its office on deadline Sunday night, editor Allison Nichols turned to Twitter. Nothing new there, but check this out — she used Twitter to try to discredit a false rumor being spread on Facebook that there was a gunman loose on campus.

Nichols and her staff used social media not only to distribute news, but to monitor it. Because they were savvy at doing both she was able to let her audience know what to fear and what not to fear. That’s journalism.

Oddly enough, e-mail was the big loser Sunday night. The University sent out their alert only after their hand was forced by the DTH’s own breaking news alert. Neither, however, sent an email saying the coast was clear. And because I wasn’t monitoring social media on Sunday night, when I logged in to my email and went to the DTH Web site on Monday morning, I was left wondering whether the bomb scare was still developing.

So, Twitter beats Facebook beats e-mail. Ready? 1-2-3…

There has long been a debate in newsrooms and academia about how useful a journalism degree in hunting for newsroom jobs. Now the debate is not only over whether prospective hires should have a journalism degree, but what type of journalism degree. Did the student cover the fundamentals of reporting and ethics? Did the student pick of fundamental tool skills such as video editing and shooting?

This debate is manifesting itself as a conversation about whether we should teach programming in journalism schools, or whether we should train people as journalists who work with programmers.

But this is the wrong debate. It focuses on the high end of very cool projects that are being done in the very best newsrooms. Our attention instead — or, also — needs to be focused on how we can create a basic fluency with information technology among all our students, even the ones who are still looking for jobs at the Saturday Evening Post.

Journalism will not be reinvented solely by the winners of the Knight News Challenge, but by copyeditors and producers and reporters and photographers in every small town in America. Not all of them need to be Adrian Holovaty. But they all need basic fluency with information technology appropriate to the field of journalism.

For whatever reason, basic IT literacy isn’t really a part of the journalism education conversation. That may be partially due to professors who see students constantly jacked in to laptops, iPods and smart phones and wrongly assume that those students know how to create and thoughtfully consume messages constructed for those media. In my brief experience, every student uses the Web but very, very few have even the most basic understanding about how it works.

I learned about the idea of IT fluency when I Googled across a 1999 report by the National Research Council title Being Fluent with Information Technology. It asked the question: “What should every citizen know about Information Technology?” The report noted correctly that education about computers often centers around the acquisition of some immediately employable skill, so the report proposed that IT fluency also incorporate the concepts and capabilities that will help people think about the world in a different way and use old tools in new ways, and even invent tools to solve problems and realize opportunities we can’t yet imagine.

The report yielded a textbook and a fantastic — and free — online course. But, ironically, the only place I’ve been able to find the book being used at UNC is in the introductory courses in the computer science department.

IT Fluency for Journalists

So, what does IT fluency for journalist look like? I like to think of it in terms of a set of exercises. Each of those exercises not only teaches a practical skill, but illustrates a broader concept. For example:

In other words, it’s great if someone who knows PHP and MySQL wants to work in journalism, but they can frankly make a lot more money elsewhere. If we want to prepare students to change journalism, then we need to teach them the language that programmers speak and foster the creativity to employ programmers to do interesting things. As it stands now, far too many journalism students have far too little technical fluency to lead — or even participate casually — a field that is undergoing historic change.

Even if they never use it, let’s stop graduating students who can’t code basic HTML, use Excel, upload files to a server, or shoot and edit digital audio and video.

The bad news is that I didn’t get a chance to have MDC’s Richard Hart host a discussion about the N.C. dropout rate. The good news is that I had a chance to run two good live experiments in online journalism.

The first, and probably most interesting, was the use of amateur reports to track the snow. Last night on Twitter I asked my followers whether there was a common location where people would be storing photos and other reports on today’s road conditions. One of my students, Sara Gregory, suggested that we set up a tag, “#CH-Snow” for people to post their accounts. And it turned out to provide some very localized views of the storm — stuff that I wasn’t getting from the local radio station’s interview with the town manager or county sheriff. Although, I also got a lot of good information from WRAL and WCHL that I would not have received elsewhere. For an example of how Twitter can be used to create an instant and ad-hoc reader news network, go here. Today also provided a much larger example of how Twitter can be used for breaking news coverage via an ad hoc network of amateurs and professionals. See #inaug09 for that example.

But journalists have to understand that in order to make such a tool work when needed they have to have already made these kinds of connections with the community. If a journalist doesn’t build a network of followers in a time of calm, he or she won’t be able to activate that network in a time of crisis.

The second innovation was the online discussion I hosted on my class Blackboard site instead of hosting live class. I gave the class a reading assignment, and they are begging to use Publish2 to extend the conversation. We are the N.C. Diploma Dilemma newsgroup on that site, if you are interested in keeping track and adding your comments as well.

Of course, online discussions are just a simple demonstration of the way that the Internet creates an on-demand information tool that transcends space and time. Of course, books do that, too. But book readers can’t backsass the author. No “Gutenberg, your drawings are LAME!” And don’t you think that’s something the Renaissance was completely lacking?

Ms. Clark died on Saturday. But the Triangle’s newspapers should ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

But it also tolls for online community sites if papers begin to kick the bucket.

The News & Observer broke the story, which piqued my curiosity about an apparently fascinating woman I didn’t know. I Tweeted that I wanted to know more about her. And Ruby Sinriech Tweeted right back that a thread of comments had been posted on the front page of her site, OrangePolitics.org.

And, sure enough, eight people — including a former town council member, the news director at the local radio station and the editor of the up-and-coming Carrboro Citizen — posted memories there.

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of reader memories on local media sites:

News & Observer – Chapel Hill News editor Mark Schultz made a plea for memories on his blog. The N&O got one.

The Herald-Sun – A story, but no comments.

WCHL – A story, but no ability to comment on stories. Which explains why Joe Schwartz went to OrangePolitics.org to leave his.

Chapel Hill News – A story, but no ability to comment on stories.

Carrboro Citizen – The ability to comment… but no story. Although editor Kirk Ross also posted on OrangePolitics.org.

I can’t rightly explain what’s happening here. Structurally, there’s not much difference between the comments on OrangePolitics and the other sites. OrangePolitics is the only site that allows anonymous comments, but those are held for moderation. The registration processes for all the sites are about the same, although the MSM sites pry for a bit more personal contact information. All sites post the comments of registered users immediately (including my single-vowel post on the N&O that I can’t seem to remove.) So it’s not a technical/structural issue.

Clearly the leaders of local media “get it.” Three leaders of local news organizations were online adding and/or seeking comment. So it’s not a philosophical issue.

So what is it? Why did the story get reported in one place, but discussed in another? Is it that OrangePolitics.org is almost totally user-generated — that conversation is woven in to that community’s information gathering process?

What would the community have lost without the newspaper reports? Finding a vacuum, would the news have broken elsewhere and still elicited comments online?

Also, it’s not as if the newspaper stories didn’t include community memories of Ms. Clark — the N&O had two sources and the Herald-Sun had five, including two of the state’s most prominent politicians. But, oddly, none of the voices on OrangePolitics.org were included in the news stories and none of the voices in the news stories were found on OrangePolitics.org.

Is this part of some new media symbiosis that brings new voices to the table while retaining the old? That merges a reporter’s initiative with a community’s contributions?

I’m not convinced. I think that kind of symbiosis would require more interaction between the two. And right now they don’t touch or acknowledge each other in any meaningful way. It is, to steal from some of my newly acquired parenting jargon, “co-playing.”

But, honestly, I’m stumped here. And I’m supposed to be giving a lecture on this kind of thing in a few weeks… I hope Dan Gillmor’s right…y’all want to help me out here?

P.S. — Oh yeah. One of the best pieces of online journalism I’ve seen recently came from Andrew Dunn, the University editor at The Daily Tar Heel. He posted it to OrangePolitics.org…