I had an interesting experience this week. It all began when I read a post on the New York Times Caucus blog that reported that more than six million questions had been submitted online for Tuesday night's presidential "town hall" in Nashville. Hmm, I said to myself, that sounds fishy. I knew enough to know that MyDebates.org was the official online partner of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and that the public's ability to send in questions for the debate through MyDebates had barely been publicized. So the idea that six million questions had somehow been submitted rang false. But that New York Times post had no external links and no named sources for that nugget of information.
So I did some digging, and it turned out that indeed the number was bunk. The six million was a casual reference at a social lunch event in Nashville that mistakenly ended up in in a Gray Lady blog post. Frank Fahrenkopf, the co-chair of the CPD, told me that he had been the source for that six million figure, saying that he picked it up from Mark Whitaker, the NBC News Washington bureau chief (who replaced Tim Russert after Russert's death). Whitaker in turn told me that the six million actually referred to every bit of communication the network got in reference to Tuesday night's debate -- not by any means, the number of actual questions that came in online, which actually turned out to number just over 25,000, about 1/240th of what was reported. Whitaker called the figure "misinterpreted and misused."
I posted on the "six million questions question" on techPresident on Wednesday afternoon, and then updated it on Thursday and Friday as I learned more. (In retrospect, it would have been good practice for me to date and timestamp those updates.) The New York Times ended up posting a "clarification."
Meanwhile, though, this bogus nugget of information was busy spreading across the world. Many publications cited "six million questions were asked online" as fact, all, it seems, because it was in a New York Times blog post. The imprimatur of the Times goes a long way, and there's the presumption that if it runs under the Times' masthead, it's true. In the pieces that picked up the six million reference, often no source was given and rarely was it linked to the original source. That wildly incorrect figure ended up being quoted everywhere from the LA Times to the Boston Globe to Australia's the Age to Grist to the Winnipeg Free Press, just to pick on just a few news outlets. Some places have since corrected it. Many others haven't.
Bloggers, of course, link stuff. It's what we do, and it's looking like an awfully good practice right now. Every reporter and writer gets things wrong, of course, but linking to sources can help minimize the damage. With no links back to the original source in those derivative pieces, the Times' "clarification" didn't help even the most careful reader all that much.
For more on the six million question questions, the Columbia Journalism Review's Megan McGinley and Armin Rosen covered the story on Friday afternoon.
UPDATE: The New York Times' Brian Stelter suggests that linking is going mainstream, writing that "[e]mbracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors." What Brian describes are mostly content-sharing arrangement and aggregator projects, but they're nonetheless a step forward. "For bloggers," he writes, "linking to original reporting, primary sources and discussions about stories is a form of etiquette, assigning credit to others who have written about a topic." Indeed.
So, Matt Yglesias has decided to leave The Atlantic to take up a post with the content-creating wing of the Center for American Progress. Super interesting stuff. Matt was the very first political blogger I ever read -- whiling away those long recess hours in the Rayburn H.O.B., circa 2002 or so. He introduced me to the possibility that blogging could be a factor in the swirl of D.C. political life. Memorieeees... Anyway, it seems Matt's hungry to be more of an activist and an advocate than a journalist, but what's particularly intriguing to me is this line in his announcement post: "From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference." As a writer/blogger with a big following, having the ability to pack up and move to a new URL is probably tremendously thrilling in a "f___ you money" sort of way. But there is a trade-off. First of all, you're probably not in as great a position to tap into institutional resources that way. And secondly, there's not as much tying you to your colleagues -- which is, in fact, one of the very reasons Matt cited for leaving The Atlantic for CAP.
I was sitting around thinking "You know what my life needs? More blog." So I'm happy to introduce trooantroo, my new Brooklyn photo blog. The name comes from the epigraph to Thomas Wolfe's 1935 article in the New Yorker "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn":
Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo, because it'd take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun' duh f_____ town.
It's ugly as sin right now, I know, but I wanted to get it out the door without obsessing over design. One thing I'm excited about is that I'm adding geo-tagging to each photo, in the form of Google Map links tied to a # sign on each post, that will make it easier for services like Outside.in to share the photos with those who might be into them.
I should probably mention that as of today I've taken over writing and editing the Daily Digest from TechPresident, a site that covers how technology is shaping politics and vice versa where I've long been a contributing editor. With the TP associate editor and my good friend Josh Levy heading over to become the managing editor at Change.org, I'll be doing the digest for a couple/few months as the Personal Democracy Forum team focuses on preparing for the upcoming PdF '08 conference and figures out how to live with Josh.
It's going to be fun. My inaugural digest is up now, and you can always sign up to get it sent right to your inbox.
Just 10 bucks gets you Air America's streaming video of the Yearly Kos conference. And if you tune in to Room 1's feed tomorrow at 2:45, you just might see me on the network neutrality panel. I do think that I've caught some sort of bug, though -- if I look a little green, it's just that.
I'm busy researching a piece on the future of filmmaking that I think is gonna be great if I can beat it into shape, but I wanted to point out this post from MyDD's Chris Bowers that asks some potentially illuminating questions about the role of the blogosphere in the Alito nomination.
I don't even think that you need to be a blog triumphalist to think that this -- a network anchor (George Stephanopoulos) questioning a U.S. Senator (Barack Obama) on air about a story posted by a blogger (Steve Clemons) regarding first-hand comments on a pressing issue (bipartisan ethics reform) made by another Senate Minority Leader (Harry Reid) during a blogger conference call -- is a pretty cool thing to happen.
