Last week, journalist Adam Penenberg learned of a $131 million verdict handed down by a Mississippi jury against Ford in the case of a New York Mets prospect who died in a Ford Explorer rollover accident in 2001. To his surprise, no media had been present for the verdict, and no news stories on the verdict were immediately forthcoming. So he took matters into his own hands — and Tweetdeck — and began tweeting out what ended up being a 1,000-plus word account of not only the verdict and the history of this case, but the context of why this was significant.
You see, in 2003, Penenberg published “Tragic Indifference,” which covered “the gut-wrenching account of the biggest product liability case in history: the Ford-Firestone fiasco, where delaminating Firestone tires caused Ford Explorers to lose control and crash at highway speeds.”
As Read Write Web thoughtfully reported:
Penenberg had an advantage over other reporters covering the case because he has written a book about the subject. A journalist who gets a complex, multi-million dollar unlawful death suit dropped in her lap is going to produce less robust coverage than one who already knows the history and the players.
That combination of better coverage, faster, is the exception rather than the rule. Every media outlet strives for both. But more often than not, the quality of an article is inversely related to the amount of time it took to create.
The Internet has made it possible to break news faster than ever, and Twitter epitomizes this. Typing 140 characters is faster than TV and much faster than blogging – especially if you can do it from your phone.
A realization I keep coming back to is that the real-time web is slippery. Good information can slip in and out of sight, quickly getting buried by the next blip on the screen. Conversely, bad information can get spread like a virus, dominating the conversation with inaccuracies and misperceptions — and the longer it propagates, the harder it is to rectify.
What gives real-time information traction is context, and Penenberg was ideally equipped to provide it in this situation. Gradually, other media outlets began picking up the story, but even Penenberg is dismissive of the value of most of it.
It just goes to show: You can get there, and you can get there quickly, but if you get there quickly with value to add — meaning context — that’s the gold standard.
Hat-tip to Boston Business Journal’s Lisa Vanderpool for bringing this to my attention.
