Sunday, July 18, 2010
From the Newsroom: Incorrect Clapton post an unfortunate mistake
From the newsroom
Michael Stowe, managing editor
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We screwed up last Sunday when we incorrectly reported on roanoke.com that Eric Clapton would play at the Down by the River festival in Roanoke.
The inaccurate information was on the site for less than two and a half hours before it was corrected -- but that doesn't make the error any less embarrassing.
I'd like to blame it all on a source who burned our reporter Tad Dickens --and that was a major factor -- but we also made several key mistakes.
It's hard to admit when you are wrong. That made this column, an update of an item posted online Tuesday on our From the Newsroom blog, tough to write.
The blog post prompted more than 20 comments from readers, as well as considerable discussion in our newsroom. I decided to use this space to explain what happened to even more people.
Rumors had been circulating for days that Hall of Fame rocker Clapton would perform with the Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi Band.
The buzz intensified that Sunday morning after Mountain Heart lead singer Josh Shilling posted on his Twitter account that he had been told Clapton would play.
Dickens, already on the scene at the concert site, sought out Kirk Avenue Music Hall's Gary Jackson for confirmation. Jackson, one of the show's promoters, told Dickens that Clapton had checked into the Hotel Roanoke on Saturday night.
A few minutes later, Dickens wrote a short news item that was published on roanoke.com at 2:55 p.m. He didn't reveal the source of his confirmation because he hadn't established with Jackson whether the conversation was on or off the record.
Soon after the story posted, we heard from the band's managers that it wasn't true. We corrected the mistake at 5:25 p.m.
Jackson's explanation as to why he told us Clapton was in town: "I was joking," he told Dickens on Tuesday. He also said he had no idea that Dickens planned to publish the information online.
I don't know Jackson's motive for misleading Dickens, but on Sunday he never let on that he wasn't serious.
Still, Dickens admits he should have more clearly told Jackson that he planned to post an online story. That might have put an end to the "joke."
That's one of several important lessons we learned.
In hindsight, we should have also had a more in-depth discussion about whether to post the story online without a named source.
Our professional standards (posted on roanoke.com) point out the perils of using unnamed sources: "Readers cannot know whether to believe or disbelieve information attributed to anonymous sources. They cannot use the information because, without knowing the source, they have no means of assessing its value."
But the standards also acknowledge that reporting sometimes requires the use of unnamed sources. It's allowed under the following conditions:
- The supervising editor determines that there is a need for the public to know the information provided by the source and no on-the-record means of obtaining it exists.
- The supervising editor knows the identity of the unnamed source.
- The reader is told as much as possible about the unnamed source and about the reason for anonymity.
- Extensive efforts have been made to corroborate the accuracy of the information provided by the unnamed source.
- The supervising editor informs the managing editor (me) or the editor (Carole Tarrant). The final decision whether to print the material rests with one of us.
We didn't meet those conditions on Sunday and our credibility suffered. That's not something we take lightly.
No one feels worse about the mistake than Dickens, who apologized to readers in a column in Friday's paper.
Dickens is one of the newsroom's most trusted reporters. He won a Virginia Press Association award for his music reviews and in 2008 won our internal Rugaber Award -- named after former Publisher Walter Rugaber -- that is given "to the staff member whose work in the past 12 months has displayed, day in and day out, an intense curiosity, a depth of understanding, and an enterprising drive to discover unique and significant stories."
This column is not intended as criticism of his work but to provide transparency to the decisions we made.
