UPDATE: It’s only fair to update stories when they’ve been debunked. Check out Michelle Goldberg’s explanation in The Nation about why Linda Tirado, lead character in one of the recent viral stories tagged as a hoax in the below article from the New York Times and also this one from CNN, is not a hoax.
Last week it was CNN, now it’s the New York Times weighing in on viral content as news. The new description of news is not “is it true?” but “is it interesting?” Submitted by Peter M. and Joe King.
If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating
by Ravi Somaiya and Leslie Kaufman
New York Times
December 9, 2013
Truth has never been an essential ingredient of viral content on the Internet. But in the stepped-up competition for readers, digital news sites are increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction, and saying that it is all part of doing business in the rough-and-tumble world of online journalism.
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Twitter posts told the tale of a feud on a plane that never occurred. The writer later said it was a short story.
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Twitter posts about a feud on a plane that never happened.
John Cook, Gawker”™s editor, said it was impossible to vet all its articles.
Several recent stories rocketing around the web, picking up millions of views, turned out to be fake or embellished: a Twitter tale of a Thanksgiving feud on a plane, later described by the writer as a short story; a child”™s letter to Santa that detailed an Amazon.com link in crayon, but was actually written by a grown-up comedian in 2011; and an essay on poverty that prompted $60,000 in donations until it was revealed by its author to be impressionistic rather than strictly factual.
Their creators describe them essentially as online performance art, never intended to be taken as fact. But to the media outlets that published them, they represented the lightning-in-a-bottle brew of emotion and entertainment that attracts readers and brings in lucrative advertising dollars.