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Media's business challenge: Is instant information good?

By Kevin Voigt
For CNN

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(CNN) -- This past April's shooting spree at a U.S. campus showed a psychopath's twisted path toward revenge, the intent of which -- despite a plethora of information -- still appears apparent only to himself.

The shootings of 32 people and the suicide of the gunman, Cho Seung Hui, also traces the distance the media business has traveled in this age of instant communication and Web 2.0 connectivity.

The shootings at Virginia Tech also shine a spotlight on a "chicken-and-egg" question bedeviling the media when reporting this high-profile crime: weighing the public's right to know against delivering a madman's message to the world.

"In the past, (global press agencies) such as AP and UPI were the determinants of how this information gets out and much gets out," says Aly Colon, head of ethics for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based school for journalism.

With new media sources "now it's a Biblical-like flood of information," he says. "Still, (the news media) has to be more effective as analyzers, investigators and verifiers of information ... especially when that responsibility is heightened by the desire for speed.

"It puts the media in a very challenging position," he says.

The crime at Virginia Tech was unprecedented by the impact of reporting by new media. The most compelling video in the hours after the shooting came not from news crews but footage captured by digital camera on the cell phone of a bystander, recording shots fired by the killer in the engineering school before police stormed the building. The minute-by-minute update by journalists online made stories that appeared in morning newspapers seem dated.

The need for speed raised the ire of one of the most powerful nation's on the planet: an initial account by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed cited unnamed sources saying the gunman was an unnamed 25-year-old Shanghai student in the United States on a student visa. According to the Associated Press, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao criticized the U.S. media for "irresponsible reports on the Virginia Tech shooting before finding out the truth, which violated their professional morals." The Sun-Times attracted more criticism for defending the erroneous report.

The actual killer was eventually identified as a student at the university, a South Korean national in the United States on a green card since 1992.

The Korean connection drew reaction from the highest places in the South Korean government. "I and our people cannot contain our feelings of huge shock and grief," said President Roh Moo-hyun, according to AP. "I pray for the souls of those killed and offer words of comfort from my heart for those injured, the bereaved families and the U.S. people."

The global reaction to the shootings was upstaged by Cho himself, who added a multimedia twist to the horrible massacre when he sent videos, photographs and writings to U.S. network news channel NBC. News anchor Bryan Jennings admitted "this is sick business indeed" when the network chose to publish portions of the videos on its channel and affiliate cable network MSNBC -- as well as on-demand viewings on network Web pages.

" (The news media) has to be more effective as analyzers, investigators and verifiers of information ... especially when that responsibility is heightened by the desire for speed. " - Aly Colon, Poynter Institute

The footage was released and widely broadcast on other networks -- including CNN -- with the footage affixed with the NBC logo.

The networks struggle over the public's right to know versus to the killer's desire for publicity.

The debate about broadcast journalism ethics following the Virginia Tech shootings reminded me of the comments the head of another news network made to me three years ago.

"We are not a TV network that broadcasts tapes as (they) come. We do have a strict policy in dealing with these tapes. We only pick and choose the news value in the tape," said Wadah Khanfar, managing director of Al Jazeera, referring to the network's controversial practice of releasing tapes from terrorists. (Unknown to me at the time, the day we interviewed was the day Osama bin Laden released his last tape four days before the 2004 U.S. election).

Analysts interviewed said the public's demand for information about the Virginia Tech shootings superseded concerns that releasing Cho's tape would aid the killer's desire for coverage and produce copy-cat killings in the future.

"It's interesting the killer chose to send it to NBC rather than just post it on YouTube," says Andrew Lih, a former professor of new media journalism at Columbia University and the University of Hong Kong. "There's still something to be said of big news networks as the arbiter of choosing the news worthiness of material."

Interesting, too, was the role of new media in covering the event. As the International Herald Tribune reported, the open-source Web information outlet Wikipedia became popular reading for up-to-date reading on the shootings; an article on the shootings was read by 750,000 in the first two days, and had 2 ,074 with more than 140 separate footnotes.

Wikipedia's coverage poked holes in the stereotype that Wikipedia and its strain of open-source Web sites are moderated by bathroom-clad non-professionals, says Lih, who is writing a book on the Wikipedia phenomena.

Lih, who watched the Wikipedia contributors converse in real-time on the Internet as it built it's coverage of the event, showed restraint, he says.

"It first was labeled as `massacre' but contributors questioned that since the figures (of the dead) were all over the place," he says. "There was constant questioning and evaluation of the material that was being reported.

Since Wikipedia entries required credible citation from news sources, in a way the traditional mass media has become "the bottom of the information pyramid" as Wikipedia distilled the often contradictory information being reported to "triangulate on what the truth actually is," he says.

"Wikipedians are looking at facts and not taking them at face value." For people 30 years old and under, such news collection and analysis will likely be a primary source of information, he says.

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