One Lazy Journalist Can Get the Rest into a Heap of Trouble
The power of the internet is increasing by the day, where bloggers can now lead the news agenda with ease and a minimal amount of spend on infrastructure. Gone are the days that you needed 100s of employees and a huge printing press to be heard. Also I have written before about blogging’s power of being able to influence journalist’s story ideas or tone of article. Indeed apparently “78% of journalists 78% of journalists the USA rely on blogs for story ideas!
Bearing the above in mind, a lazy journalist seems to have fallen foul of basic journalist principles of always triangulating the source of a story or rumour. The offending spoof story was used as “linkbait” (spoof story to drive traffic to a website) and was regarding a 13 yr old boy and his spending habits with his dad’s credit card. He apparently used the credit card to purchase ladies of the night to play with him on his XBOX….
I have seen this tabloid story do the rounds on the internet which was originally “seeded” (planted on a blog / social networking site to be picked up virally) on the Digg site and soon gained a popular following, then managed to get picked up on the “Credit Card site. money.co.uk
One has to seriously questions the ethics of this type of SEO and whether it is moral at all. As a PR, you would risk serious damage to a client’s reputation if you were to carry out such an act. However, I find it intriguing how the media hunts in packs and once one reputable resource publishes a factually unsound story the remainder jump on the bandwagon.
Following the money.co.uk article, Fox News, The Sun, Metro and Radio One have all published the story, so it just goes to show how media has trust in its peers as well as the internet now too!
