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Wired Amends Stories With Fabricated Quotes
SiliconEntity writes "Wired Online has been forced to correct dozens of stories in the wake of disclosures that reporter Michelle Delio may have fabricated quotes. Wired has published over 700 stories by Delio since 2000, and in a review of 160 of the most recent ones, 24 were found to have quotes that could not be confirmed. Several of the Wired stories being questioned were discussed on Slashdot, including Spyware on My Machine? So What?, Minniapple's Mini Radio Stations, The Masters of Memory Lane, and probably many more. Wired is not the only one to get burned; MIT Technology Review and InfoWorld have also had to retract or alter stories written by Delio." Update: 05/10 19:20 GMT by Z : Altered to clarify Wired's actions.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It should be noted that Ms. Delio is not being accused of wholesale fabrication as a certain writer for the NYT was found out having done.
What has apparently happened is an accountability problem. She's taken too much second-hand information and reported it as first hand in a double handful of articles. A journalism prof and several grad students were able to confirm the vast majority of her quotes and attributions.
This amounts to sloppiness, carelessness and unprofesionalism rather than blatant deception or malicious intent.
It'll probably still end her writing career, however.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Before your knees starts jerking...
If you RTFA, you'll learn that of 700 articles, only about 24 had citation issues, and of those, only FOUR were articles that relied on unconfirmed quotes. The woman didn't cite her sources correctly, that's all this is.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
When I was interviewed by Wired (published May 2003, page 43; it's not worth looking up though, trust me), an editor contacted me for follow-up a few days after the freelancer who wrote the article to double-check that I was who I said I was and that I said the things that they were going to publish. Maybe they've become more lax in the two years since then, or maybe this reported falsified the contact information for the sources.
n'th rule of interviews: Record everything you say to a reporter! Some states allow you to record without informing the reporter. To be on the safe side, if you don't know the laws of your state, ask the reporter if it's OK. If (s)he says "no", why the smeg are you still giving an interview?
(I thought of this myself, but I have later found it verified in information pamphlets on dealing with the media.)
n+1'th rule: Everything is on the record. Even if the camera appears to be turned off, the tally (the red blinking light) isn't on or whatever.
My own rule: Bloggers are your best friend if a journalist c**** on you. "Crockumentary" filmmaking and reporting, while still financially viable, isn't as damaging to the "public record" as it used to be. The people who want to believe the a**-journalist will still do it, but other people will know better.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Verity Stob, now there's a healthy specimen.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Actually, if you read Penenberg's report, he only looked at a sample of 160 of Delio's articles. Of those, 24 had sources Penenberg's team could not confirm. I don't know where you get your four number.
I was the editor of the "Enterprise Blogs and Wikis" story for InfoWorld that Penenberg talks about in his report and I can confirm that Ms. Delio similarly did not respond to requests that she identify the partial sources she cited in that article. Other editors at InfoWorld followed up on sources in other stories independently and were unable to confirm those sources.
Tempest in a teapot? Maybe. To tell the truth, if there were fabricated quotes in the articles Ms. Delio wrote for me, I really don't think they did a whole lot of damage to the stories themselves. Barring the unconfirmed sources I mentioned, I do believe that her articles were meant to be factual stories written in good faith. That's why InfoWorld, like Wired, has not actually retracted any of Ms. Delio's stories; in some cases we have excised certain portions of those stories from the online versions, but all of the stories are still available (though it's only about four stories total for us, if I remember right).
That's kind of the shame of this whole thing, too. It doesn't give me any joy to see Ms. Delio dragged out in front of the court of public opinion for what may have been nothing more than a pattern of very poor judgment. But anytime a writer may have fabricated something in an otherwise ostensibly factual story, that's the kind of tempest in a teapot you want your media sources to jump all over. You just can't let it slide.
InfoWorld won't be able to use Ms. Delio's services anymore, but for myself I wish her the best of luck and hope she can move on from this episode in a way that is satisfying for her both personally and professionally. (Note that these statements are my own and do not represent the official opinion of InfoWorld magazine or its parent company, IDG.)
Breakfast served all day!
Book: Hard News : The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, by Seth Mnookin
Beyond the obvious fraud commited by Jayson Blair, Mnookin delves into what was wrong in the NYT newsroom and managerial organization that allowed Blair to get away with it. In short: an imperious Howell Raines alienated his subordinate editors and the communications process broken down, allowing a "charismatic crook" to slip past the checks and balances that normally would catch him.
Movie: Shattered Glass, starring *cough* Hayden Christensen ...
At the New Republic, Stephen Glass was able to subvert their fact checking process -- starting with occasionally making up quotes, he ended up fabricating entire stories out of whole cloth. The Forbes Digital investigation that finally brought him down will likely be interesting to readers here
I'm purposely not reading the comments on this thread, because the naivety exhibited will certainly make my head spin, and I need to get back to work. In short, just like the typical Slashdot reader knows a hell of a lot more about the subtleties of IT than a journalist, the journalism professional knows a hell of a lot more about the subtleties of journalism ethics than 99% of Slashdot readers.
And above all, spend a little time reading "hard" journalism once in while (even online versions of the old media, like NYT, WP, etc.) and get a feel for what rigorous journalism looks like. Blogs have their own set of problems that you may be blind to if you never read "real" reporting ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
This is how it would be with most magazines, bit with Wired, the difference is much less subtle than that. The online version is basically just a franchise operation, run by a completely different company.
That seems pretty stupid, I know: Most publications care enough about their reputation to have the Web site bear some relation to the print version, and you'd think that would be particularly important to one whose subject matter is so tied up with the Web. But I guess Wired has some reason for it, probably involving the people who run the Web site paying a large amount of money for the rights to the brand name.
1. Groklaw covers the SCO lawsuit from a legal perspective, and according to unbiased sources, better than anyone else.
2. The editor of Groklaw (PJ) is definitely pro-FOSS and anti-SCO and says so frequently on the site. This does not stop Groklaw from publishing the source documents on which their opinions are based so you can think and evaluate for yourself. There is a clear demarcation between editorial content and content that is presented as fact.
3. Groklaw has a 'corrections go here' link after every story.
Which is a good thing. What it does cover, it covers better than anyone as a result.
"2. Growlaw silently edits posts instead of publishing explicit corrections."
Not true. Notable corrections to stories are noted in the story with an "UPDATED" note. Minor typos are corrected without that, but even there you can find the trail of corrections in the Corrections thread. As for editing postings from users, that's not possible with the software and does not and cannot happen.
"3. Groklaw is biased pro-IBM, pro-OSS, anti-SCO in what little it does cover."
How could you be otherwise, given the facts of the case which are now well-known? But if IBM goes off the rails, Groklaw will be after them too.
That's pretty interesting, but there's a subtle difference between wired magazine (dead tree) and wired news (online).
It's not that subtle. They've been owned by different companies since 1998. Conde Naste owns Wired Magazine but Lycos owns Wired Digital.
What's ridiculous is that slashdot amended the headline, and it's still WRONG. It should be "Wired Amends Stories with Unverifiable Quotes" No one is accusing her of fabricating anything, just sloppily citing sources. There was only one person out of hundreds who claimed he was quoted without actually being interviewed, but that could have been a case of duplicate names, mixed up notes, or something else - certainly not a pattern.