Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Raissa Robles is an armchair journalist who gets away with single source stories. She's also a geek and most of her reports are gotten off google. That maybe acceptable to the blogs but not for someone who is also supposed to be a trained journalist by virtue of her work with the south china morning post. Anybody can google anything. In the same way anyone can put anything that can be googled on the web. The diff between new media people and professional journalists is the pros would know how to vet information, check with legit sources. If Raissa was a pro in the true sense of the word, she would have gotten whatever she took from the web, checked it with sources in the US and gotten primary documents or interviews with official sources, at least 2. Did she do that? The sloppy sourcing in this story only shows you there was malicious intent in reporting the story because it was publicized without proper vetting. Journalists must be careful in sourcing and vetting reports lest they fall into the quagmire of social media which is lynch mobbing. Only professional media would have the clout and resources to vet the so called wisdom of the crowds which aren't necessarily wise all the time. 

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