There’s an interesting debate going on between the New York Times and the tech blogs over how the journalism produced by bloggers are fueled by rumours, sometime nonfactual, compared to the bastions of the industry, which would be the physical newspaper.

The debate stemmed from this NYT article which provides a few examples which Techcrunch and Gawker have posted rumours, correcting them by updates, and links the practice to ‘yellow journalism’, the jargon-y name which was coined during W. Randolph Heart’s reign at the New York Journal and its coverage of the Spanish War in the early 20th century. (A quick aside, Ken Whyte’s book on Hearst is a highly recommended read)

Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post.

Arrington was understandably upset at the NYT’s charges. In a Techcrunch post, he responds to the NYT, quite angrily, I might add, and defends his craft.

But anyway, media outlets like the NYTimes think that having to update a story is a sign of weakness. I believe the opposite, that it’s a sign of transparency and a promise to our readers to continue to give them the best information we have. Corrections and updates are made constantly to big news posts.

Journalism professor and author of What Would Google Do (again, another excellent book) Jeff Jarvis also argues that the New York Times is in no position to set journalism standards for the rest of the industry, no matter how high its reputation could be.

The problem with this tiresome, never-ending alleged war of blogs vs. MSM (Arrington attacks The Times) and MSM vs. blogs (The Times attacks Arrington) – (Mark Glaser scolded me for rising to The Times’ bait – is that it blinds each tribe from learning from the other. Yes, there are standards worth saluting from classical journalism. But there are also new methods and opportunities to be learned online. No one owns journalists or its methods or standards.

As much as I disagree with Jarvis’s insistence that online news cannot/should not be free, he is absolutely correct in this instance. Whether we like it or not, we’re in a new period of journalism, indeed, all of it is in a ‘beta’ version, with necessary updates needed to move the story further. Elias Bizannes just nails it: technology is enabling us to evolve our ability to communicate a.

A good example: as I type this, the Breaking News Online Twitter account immediately corrected itself after published a message the other day that the President of Gabon has died. It may be impossible to verify such news reports during the noise and confusion of a major event, but once the news got out, it was important that they got the story right.

Furthermore, at my old job at the Financial Post, I’ve made a couple errors in some of my reporting, but I was always quick to correct my copy and update it with full transparency. That’s just the type of environment we, as journalists, should be used to, and more importantly, it’s one that are readers are already used to. In times like these, we can’t afford to let blogs dictate where the industry should go nor should newspapers carry its weight around and tell the industry what to do – the on-going first draft of history will be one that will always be in a constant state of editing and updating, corrections be damned.

Illustration courtesy of Jeff Jarvis