Posts tagged journalism

It was a big, busy day in the bustling GTA and this plucky cub reporter has a lot of things to say!
- A poetic salutation by Lauren O’Neil.

As some of you may have felt (if you live in Ontario, Quebec or the Northern United States), a 5.5 magnitude earthquake rocked the earth up in my neck of the woods today.

It was approximately 1:46 p.m. when tremors hit the 5th floor (and probably every other floor) of the Toronto Star building according to my log.

I was sitting in the box, deeply engaged in the story I was writing about marine restrictions between June 25th and 27th (I guess a bunch of rich dudes are throwing some big fancy party to talk about how rich they are at The Metro Convention Centre this weekend or something… how terribly inconvenient!) when I felt the building start to sway.

I’d heard that there were going to be severe storms today (still waiting on that), so I figured that it was probably a strong gust of wind – until it kept happening. I got up from my chair and looked around the newsroom. Everybody else was doing the same thing.

That’s when I started to get excited.

Did somebody bomb the convention centre? Are G20 protesters rioting downstairs? Could we, just maybe, be experiencing a real live EARTHQUAKE?!? Like the movie stars in HOLLYWOOD? Like Zach and the gang in that episode where Mrs. Belding has her baby in an elevator?

I’ve only ever experienced one earthquake before, and I don’t even remember it. It was when I was in Grade 5 and it was like, 8:30 p.m. and I was already in bed and slept right through it. All of my classmates who stayed up like because they were cooler than me were talking about it was the next day and I totally had to lie about how the picture frames FLEW OFF OF MY WALLS and UP INTO THE AIR LIKE GHOSTS!

I’ve never been a very good liar.

As soon as our bodies stopped rocking, the newsroom was all “full steam ahead!” – not that it wasn’t already. The days just keep getting busier as the G-CRUMMY gets closer  (see what I did there? see? HA! I slay myself, I do!)

The phones were ringing off the heezy with citizen tips, and the Twitterverse was abuzz with #earthquake chatter (I think that calling the newspaper must have been what people did before Twitter was around, ya know? I talked to a lot of precious old ladies today on the phone about how their plants and couches were shaking.)

I frantically tried to reach Earthquakes Canada, but of course their website wasn’t loading because the internet connectivity had dropped like woah.

When I did manage to finagle their digits, I couldn’t get through to an operator because everybody else was calling them too (scientists must feel like rockstars when natural disasters occur, eh?). So I called the Americans instead. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that is was, in fact, a 5.5 Magnitude earthquake we had just felt – and not the Decepticons, as I had secretly feared.

All of this came on the heels of an already uberbusy day.

I started my morning trying to snuff out the story of a suspicious package found at Queens Park station, which turned out to be nothing more than a briefcase someone had left behind. That little black “package” shut down the University subway line for an hour and a half during rush hour. Oi. The city of Toronto feels like a giant freakin’ post 9-11 American airport right now.

After that, the scanners were going nuts with all this gobbily gook about a cemetary sitch. I don’t think I’m allowed to repeat what I hear on the scanners on my blog. Even if I could, is that integrous? Whatever. I DID get everything I put into the article confirmed bye ze police, ’cause that’s how we roll in the box: PYAW!

Just as the earthquake kerfuffle was dying down a titch, one my editors came in like “Can you call the police to find out what’s going on at the Eaton Centre? Someone’s saying that there’s a man with a rifle there and it’s being evacuated…”

Holysnap, right?

I called the Division the mall is in right away. The Staff Sergeant was busy, so I called the Eaton Centre instead. After being put on hold for about 10 minutes, some stodgy sounding man came on the phone saying that it was against procedure to speak with the media and that I’d have to get my information from the police.

He was obviously very important. (what does an eye-roll emoticon look like?)

Of course, the fact that he wasn’t talking got me a little bit worried. I started to think of my friends who work and/or shop in the mall and I remembered that – YES! I have friends who WORK and SHOP in the mall! They’ll tell me if there is, in fact, a psycho on the loose near Yonge-Dundas square!

Exceppppt they couldn’t, because I couldn’t call them. I had just lost all of my address book contacts (yay BlackBerry auto-sync. NOT.). So I did what I do best – I took to Twitter.

A quick search for “Eaton Centre” revealed dozens of tweets saying “Rumour has it that the Yonge and Dundas subway station had a man with a machine gun and the entire Eaton Centre just got evacuated.”

‘Holy Moly!’ I thought, as I logged into my personal Twitter account to see if anybody I knew had posted about the incident.

My next move had the potential to cost me more cred as a journalist, in my opinion, than almost anything I’ve done to date (except for maybe this).

I re-tweeted the “rumor”.

Now, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if I was just some kid – but I’m supposed to be a reporter. Verification of facts is my GAME.

Not only am I n00b journalist, I’m a flaming tweet-a-holic. You’d think that I would know the power and potential of a tweet gone awry better than anybody.

According to Klout, my Tweets have the potential to reach approximately a quarter of a million people.

That’s a lot of misinformed Tweeps.

After calling 2 different police divisions, their communications line, and the main police headquarters, it was confirmed that whoever had called in the initial report was confused.

Apparently, a man had been taken into custody in the area hours earlier for busting out a fake gun or something in a subway terminal (don’t quote me on that). There was no evacuation. There was no rifle. But I’d been retweeted dozens of times by this point – and my retweets had been retweeted too. It was spreading like wildfire.

So much so that Toronto Police put out a counter-tweet:

I felt like a bloody idiot.

After all the things I’d learned in J-School about accuracy, about the dangers of using Twitter as a source… I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done. I jumped the gun and, even though it was from my own personal Twitter account and not an actual article, I spread information that wasn’t true.

I left work feeling worse than that time Petah did something mildly zany and I had a flashback to it for comedic effect.

I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter whether or not I put unverified facts into a news article that makes it into the newspaper (though thankfully there are editors to ensure that this would never happen) or tweet unverified facts from my personal account.

Okay, so there’s a HUGE difference in terms of impact, but the point is that if I’m going to choose to make it known that I’m working as a journalist – if I’m going to publicly associate my name with my employer’s brand – then I need to hold my Twitter feed up to the same standard that I would hold my professional work up to. Or maybe I should abstain from trying to break news on a personal account altogether.

These are things that I already sort of knew, deep down, but didn’t really think about until after I’d clicked that irrevocable send button.

I’m learning that what the grownups say is true: They can teach you all about the practice and principles of a profession in school, but it’s not until you actually encounter these types of issues in the real world that you truly learn.

I am reminded (said the sage old post-grad) of a young doctor I once knew while interning at a hospital. He told me all about how, in medical school, he had studied human anatomy extensively. He knew everything he needed to know about the practice of dissecting a body, but when it came time to make the first cut into a cadaver, he almost tossed his cookies. But he didn’t puke; he made the cut. It was really hard at first, he said, but the experience taught him more than any book could have.

You get what I’m sayin’, right? Growing pains.

Nothing wrong with making mistakes if you can learn from them to improve your game in the future. I guess I’d rather learn this lesson within my first month on the job than down the road once I’ve established some real cred and something mega’s at stake.

Anyways, I just want to apologize to anyone who may have been freaked out by my tweet earlier today. I hope that in time, I can earn your trust back… but until then, I’ll stick to what I know best – Hilaritawesomeness.

Check out the saddest IMDB profile ever (via @DarynJones):

heh heh heh…

Bed time for me! Majorhuge day tomorrow. If you thought my Perez interview was cool, just wait until you see who I’ve got lined up next eeeee!

<3,

Laur-Anne Sellors O’Nizzle