Declining to answer this question submitted by Municipalist today in his weekly online chat was Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz:
Does it matter that, as Joel Achenbach noted in his blog, the Post was beaten in reporting Russert's death by Wikipedia? Doesn't that portend or perhaps reflect a huge shift out there?
And Kurtz declined to answer. To be fair, the guy could have received hundreds of questions to his chat, and there was zero intent. But we wonder.
Municipalist did however track down Dan Rosenthal, a press contact with the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that hosts Wikipedia.
In an email, his reply to us:
It's an example of how wikis are a powerful tool for producing accurate, up to the minute news. To be fair, we were not the only ones who beat the AP to the story, if my memory is correct, the Drudge Report beat the AP by about 15 minutes on the story, and we beat the Drudge Report by about 30 minutes on top of that.
We were also one of the first websites to break the news on the Virginia Tech massacre, something that has been extensively covered by the mainstream media as an example of how the Wikipedia entry was often more complete and extensive, and updated with information faster than they themselves could do it. (The NY Times has two particularly good stories on the subject, one by Noam Cohen and one by Jonathan Dee).
Back to Tim Russert, the initial post regarding his death is from an IP address belonging to a company that reportedly is an NBC contractor. Because Wikipedia edits are updated instantly, the editor was able to immediately update the Wikipedia entry on Russert, possibly even from their mobile device, long before an AP reporter got the story and it was written, edited, and sent for wire distribution.
Even though Kurtz ignored Wikipedia, he did address one part of the story, that of holding off until Russert's family was notified:
Silver Spring, Md.: I enjoyed Tim Russert's work and will miss him. I know the staff at NBC must be devastated. I did find it interesting that Keith Olberman, who I am sure was grief stricken, criticized other media outlets for reporting Russert's death before his family had been notified. He was correct that reporting the news that way was probably wrong. What organizations did that? Also, does NBC News have a policy of waiting for the family to be notified before reporting a death?
Howard Kurtz: Some news organizations broke it online; the NYT may have been in that category. CNN and Fox jointly agreed to wait for NBC to break the news, and NBC was waiting until the family was notified. CNN Washington bureau chief David Bohrmann says CNN was particularly cautious because Tim's wife and son were in Italy and might have heard the news on CNN International. The networks generally don't report military deaths until the next of kin has been notified (and the Pentagon usually delays the news for that reason). On other kinds of deaths, I believe it's on a case-by-case basis.
This comes from a good place, I think. But the situation with the Internet these days is such that information like this is going to get out. Fast. This kind of view is just quaint. And naive. Go ahead and hold it back, even as the Internet will immediately rush it out there. Mainstream journalism simply refuses to grapple with these issues. Does Kurtz not know about the Wikipedia contribution here? Or is it totally off his media critic radar? And if it is, what does that say?
Update: We followed up the next day with Wikipedia's Dan Rosenthal with this question: What about the charge from some in mainstream media, referenced in my post and in one of Kurtz's questioner's Monday, that jumping the gun may not have been kind to Russert's family, who may not have heard the news, etc.?
That concern certainly has merit, however keep in mind that the time span between when Wikipedia broke the story and the mainstream news broke the story was just minutes, and in that time Russert's family were undoubtedly being contacted by both the authorities and NBC. As I mentioned before, the IP address that initially published the news belonged to someone reportedly related to NBC. Would it have made any difference which source or news outlet they chose for the story? The decision to break the story belonged with the person behind that IP address. You'd have to ask them whether they thought it was ethical to break the story like that. Regardless of the reasons why the editor took his actions, my heart goes out to Russert's family, and I hope they found out about their loss in the most compassionate way possible.
Update II: This blog reports who got on the air when, and also reveals that the IP address of the editor of the Russert Wikipedia entry that day was from a company called Internet Broadcasting, "which runs the websites for NBC's local media division ..."
More analysis here. And Jon Fine of Business Week is the only big-time media critic we have found so far to mention this.
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