ecarvin

Absolutely. It can be a very powerful newsgathering tool, because a) primary source material (as opposed to links to existing stories) is often posted there, and b) many reddit users have an incredible knowledge base on their particular areas of interest, making them potentially powerful sources. Also, honestly, a lot of mainstream journalists still aren’t really paying attention to reddit, so if you do, you can give yourself a real competitive advantage.

Of course, tips we find on reddit need to be treated as just that -- tips. They need to be carefully reported out. For example, some bad information related to the Boston bombings obviously got a lot of eyeballs on reddit, but as journalists, we were wise to be watching to see if any useful information emerged.

Yes, we would cite (and have cited) information from reddit in a story, but only after we’ve verified the information separately. We’ve gotten some interesting stories this way, including a really strong one about companies asking job applicants for their Facebook passwords. The origin of that story was a reddit post noticed by one of our reporters -- it was simply a picture of a job application with a space for “Facebook password.” Needless to say, the post (and our story) elicited some impassioned response.

How exactly we cite the information depends on the specific circumstances. If reddit is central to the story, we’d mention that, but otherwise, we treat it like information we found (and then confirmed) from anywhere else.

On your first question: The easiest way to avoid reporting something that’s not confirmed is to avoid reporting it. (Until it’s confirmed.) As they say, “Get it first, but first, get it right” -- that’s really the mantra at AP. There’s a lot of pressure to move quickly, but we’re perfectly happy holding off when we’re not confident about accuracy -- including when we find a compelling bit of UGC that we haven’t verified. Yes, the competitive pressure to be first will always be there. It’s a priority here. But it’s not the top priority. Getting it right comes first.

As for human interest pieces and “soft news” -- there’s a lot of demand for this sort of content, so I wouldn’t expect it to go away. Here at AP, we do our share of feature content, but we do so alongside our breaking news and investigative reporting.

I've been a journalist for 18 years, the last 13 of them at AP. I've had a number of old-fashioned editing jobs here, ranging from national news editor to top stories editor to supervising editor. But I've also had a lot of gigs that moved me toward more innovative and interactive content. I was the news editor of asap, an experimental and multimedia-oriented news operation within AP that existed from 2005 to 2007 -- we did a lot of innovative pieces there (IM debates among political bloggers, handing a camera to a member of the public during a news event, etc.) that were precursors to social media, I think. I also edited Ask AP, which (several years ago) had AP journalists answer reader questions.

I don’t know anything about the specific circumstances surrounding this particular story, so I can’t comment on how it was handled. But this sort of thing has sadly become more common in the world of digital newsgathering. The bottom line: A news organization needs to rely on old-fashioned reporting principles to confirm any story, no matter how they learn about it. An email like the one you’re describing is something we would consider a news tip, not news. We’d look into it and report it if we could confirm it. Journalism is journalism, no matter what the means of communication, and we mustn’t loosen standards in the interest of speed or in response to the rise of social media.