There is currently a crisis emerging in mainstream media. It is called, we don’t check the facts or seek quotes from other parties in the know on a subject to see if it is correct or not before we publish. Don’t get me wrong, Sarah Halzack’s article, “Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere” is actually filled with highly useful and well researched information about blog usage in companies big and small. I actually love the Washington Post for it’s linking to sources and its page numbers on the online article – these provide great context and are things other newspapers would be wise to learn (and implement) pronto. It is a newspaper that overall that “gets it”.
However, her assertion that Jason Calacanis has “retired from blogging” is utter complete nonsense that indicates a lack of research into the issue that distracts from an otherwise excellent article.
As you likely know, Jason Calacanis now has an email newsletter that seems to have a rather well organized “guest blogger” distribution network associated with it. Though Jason will likely never admit it publicly, it appears this was his plan all along. I have to tip my hat to him in as much as it actually increases his overall distribution network. Jason (and his “dogs”) also use Twitter which is called micro-blogging. Wikipedia defines it this way (as of this writing)
“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”
So to say Jason has retired from blogging is, in reality at this time, factually inaccurate. But a simple reaching out to other bloggers and sources by the Washington Post could have easily revealed this issue. This is important as others may misinterpret “Jason’s retirement” and it could adversely affect someone’s blogging strategy due to such misinformation.
Sarah – could you please check out the situation a little deeper in the future so that thousands of people aren’t misinformed?
I see no reason why Jason’s quote should be in that article, and the article itself seems to be past tense.
It seems everyone is in a hurry to post “good” content to their blog or something a bit controversial but publish it before they check facts. It inevitably only backfires..
[…] disregard for facts that David recently discussed when he pointed out that The Washington Post had falsely reported that Jason Calacanis, CEO of the mobile search engine provider Mahalo, had stopped …. An observation that, once analyzed fully and completely, proves to be technically incorrect. […]