Slow News Movement: Taking the time to get it right

Andy Carvin of NPR led a session at the 2013 Online News Association conference in Atlanta last week “on how the media gets breaking news wrong and whether social media could be used more creatively to mitigate these errors.”

As I mentioned last week, Carvin has been a pioneer in using social media, especially Twitter, as a tool in breaking-news reporting. As background for his session, Carvin pointed to the transcript of a keynote speech he’d given at an earlier conference, headlined “Can Social Media Help Us Create A More Informed Public?” and to a recent blog post, headlined “When Reporting Breaking News, Words Matter – And Sometimes Languages, Too,” which is what I wrote about on this blog last week.

Carvin chose the hashtag #slownews for people tweeting about the session, after the idea of a Slow News Movement, which has accuracy, rather than speed, as its main goal.

Carvin’s Storify of the session is a good read. You’ll be able to follow the general flavor of the conversation as well as follow links to a couple of excellent pieces on the same subject.

What struck me is that the general theme that emerged looked familiar to me. I’ll let Kim Fox, content director at ScribbleLive spell it out in a pair of tweets:

@KelseyProud When I was at @cbcnews management encouraged us to be transparent: ‘What we know, what we don’t know’. (1/2) #ona13 #slownews

— Kim Fox (@kimfox) October 18, 2013

. @KelseyProud Needs to come from top, and public thankful /understands it (2/2) #ona13 #slownews

— Kim Fox (@kimfox) October 18, 2013

And here’s reporter Jessica Estepa of Environment & Energy Publishing:

.@acarvin: Creating slow news movement = having proactive representation about what’s going on, what’s true & not true. #ONA13 #ONAUncon

— Jessica Estepa (@jmestepa) October 18, 2013

That sounds an awful lot like what I like to call Lennay’s Law: Tell us what you know is true, and tell us how you know it.