Speed and/or Accuracy

Technology has helped deliver news instantly. Waiting for the nightly news to find out what has happened in the day is a thing of the past. Now, news is literally a click away.

A problem that has arisen with fast breaking news is accuracy. Journalists are attempting to break the story as fast as possible and are constantly posting new details, correct or not. The trade off between speed versus accuracy always tends to favour a faster update, rather than a correct news article.

In my opinion, as bad as it sounds, this isn't such a bad thing.

My reasoning behind this is rather simple. There is always the ability to make up for mistakes. By positing regular updates with clarified information a journalist is able to fix ambiguity in previous posts.

Live blogs are great examples of how speed and accuracy come into play when reporting breaking news. The general focus of live blogs is speed. Post every detail that surfaces, check its accuracy earlier.

This is great for the consumer of the news because it allows them to keep up to date with every thing that is taking place.

However, it does lead to problems because of inaccurate information being reported. But, like I said before, with an update that can be posted as fast as the original news, a mistake can be rectified or more information can be added.

So for me, I will take speed over accuracy any day, purely because accuracy will eventuate with due time.