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• twitter
• web 2.0

Earlier today, the LA Times Twitter feed reported the following:

California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage (Prop 8) ban: http://bit.ly/hhwEg

This was retweeted (passed along by many Twitter users) for a few minutes before everyone realized that the story was a year old. Proposition 8 had not, in fact, been overturned. As Robert Scoble notes, this Twitter tizzy can be traced back to the LA Times inaccurate tweet.

I point to this story because of our recent discussions on the Blogora about journalism. The LA Times clearly still carries a good bit of weight. People read it in the LA Times Twitter feed, and they assume that it's credible. Those who retweeted this headline didn't look closely at the date on the article, and that's because the LA Times is typically a reliable information filter. But it's not only the LA Times that's at fault. Clearly, there was a problem with the tweet and the retweets. We all need to read a little bit more carefully, even in a speedy space like Twitter.

For me, this small hiccup is an indication that a) news organizations still carry weight; b) the importance of the speed of information transfer is outweighing the importance of accuracy; c) traditional news organizations are scrambling to keep up and making mistakes in the process.

Is an LA Times tweet held to a different standard than a jamesjbrownjr tweet? Yes. And it should be. I should be able to trust the LA Times Twitter feed as much as I trust the LA times front page. But a flattened media environment means that traditional news organizations are allowing their ethoi to be sullied. In the push to keep up with a quickening pace of information delivery, they are losing their biggest asset: the trust of readers.

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