Oh its a basic journalistic trick. Each journalist wants to give the impression that they see both sides of each story. But if they have a hot story they really do not want to wait to hear the other side. So they request a comment, wait an unreasonably short time, and then print the story saying "we requested a comment from the other side but they did not provide a comment by the deadline for this story".
It used to be that there was a set deadline to respond because of a broadcast time or a printing run. A responsible journalist would call for a comment and if they weren't available they'd let them know when the story had to be done.
So here we are when the "journalists" are controlling the printing runs and in this case they thought 24 minutes was a fair time for a response. I think this speaks more about the level of journalism practiced at TechCrunch than anything else, and this Facebook prank actually goes a long way to show that.
What kinda baffles me is that all those old deadlines were set by management, the reporters always wanted more time to craft the story and get it right. There were epic battles between reporters and editors over time versus distribution. Now that there's instant publishing the reporters have the same itchy trigger fingers. Just like the before everyone's afraid of being "scooped".
That's a really good point. I'd argue though that web journalists running their own site are also wearing the management hat and are more concerned with the bottom line than the journalist of old who had that bottom line abstracted form them through bureaucracy.
This is just as much a problem with the average consumer's attention span as the content producer's race to print. If this is their policy on stories and yet we still read them and comment on them, well then I guess we value the quick fix even though we complain about it.
Exactly. Whenever you read 'did not return message seeking comment' or 'could not be reached for comment' you really should read 'we try to make it seem like we tried but they didn't care in order to make ourselves more important'.
And it puts the pressure on the parties of who they 'request comment' to replay, knowing that if they don't that that dreaded sentence will be in the article, effectively a small component in the trial by media arena.
There are other examples of such code phrases but this one is particularly annoying.
As though everybody in the world should be at the beck and call of the media, and doing nothing is already a strike against you.
Sure, if a politician stonewalls on a subject call them out for it. But don't use that phrase every second article in order to make it seem that the media are something you ignore at your peril. Plenty of people are loathe to talk to reporters simply out of - justified - fear of being misquoted.
Yeah, most recently, I was asked on a sunday night at 7pm pst for a story that went to publication/web posting the following morning. God forbid I should skip email for a night, right?
The press can really suck. There are really good reporters and there are terrible ones. Some will go out of their way to get you to say what they want you to say even if it takes cutting your words completely out of context.
I'm completely out of the spotlight and happy about that, but there was a time when that was not the case. My policy was very simple.
You can print it after I sign off on it otherwise no deal.
Cost me a couple of interviews but on the whole it paid off in that I got some control over the process. Some of these things are misunderstandings, especially when matters are technical, but there are also examples of more deliberate misrepresentations.
True, but it sounds like TC has a pretty tight relationship with FB's PR team. If they got the request in the 24 minutes you can be sure they ignored it, or it would have ruined the whole joke.
I still can't believe the fake feature actually worked. That's a brilliant prank.
I think a lot of the responses to this are really unfair. First, this isn't something that is possibly detrimental to the company (Facebook) so printing it without hearing their "side of the story" is extremely low risk. Second, they're reporting something factual. Ignore the fact that there was a bit of a trick in who saw the feature. There was a button on the site, this wasn't an unconfirmed rumor or anything like that.
TechCrunch asked for more information on the featured, they didn't get it, and they wrote a story based on what they had observed themselves.
The idea that they in some way were being sleazy or should have waited longer to be fair to Facebook is just silly. If this was a material issue that Facebook wanted to comment on, they would have. This happened during normal business hours, not in the middle of the night on a weekend. Facebook PR is a well run machine.
For a bit of context, I run our PR/marketing at Justin.tv and when I get requests like this the first thing I do is call the reporter, usually within a minute. That is my job and the nature of reporting is that timeliness is incredibly valuable. If I ignored that and didn't respond as fast as possible I wouldn't be doing my job.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but waiting 24 minutes is a pretty long time in the blogging world for something like this. Had it been something controversial or potentially damaging I would have waited longer and tried calling more people.
But this was just a basic feature that was apparently live for everyone (at least, everyone in the TC office). I was really only contacting them to see if they had an explanation as to why they'd want to implement this.
If waiting 24 minutes to get basic information for a story is a "pretty long time in the blogging world," then maybe there's something wrong with the blogging world.
Of course there is! Shame on the journalist who gives us what we want! Who's traffic spikes when they practice what we consider sketchy... right before we ourselves go read the article.
Sometimes I even read the terrible article before I complain about it's integrity.
I really wish these guys would show more integrity than me, and simply ignore the fact that I lap up whatever they post.
I think that's great. I sometimes read crap though. I get sucked in by those OMG THE WORLD IS ENDING AND YOU NEED TO READ THIS TO LIVE type headlines... even though I know better I still click on it.
You're a more disciplined man than I, and it's good to know some people are making the effort to keep them honest.
It's a lot more efficient for the journalist to maintain integrity in the authoring of information than it is to have every reader scrutinize that information for a lack of it.
If a new facebook feature is reason enough to throw all reason and caution overboard then how can we ever trust anything TechCrunch writes to begin with.
Surely the world does not lose anything critical if you verify if what you see is not an anomaly but an actual released feature ?
No press release ? No statement on a blog somewhere ? No verification from FB ?
Run the presses, we've got a scoop!
It really does sound ridiculous, 24 minutes for 'something like this' makes it sound as though the appearance of a new feature in facebook is of earth shattering importance.
By falling for this prank you may have shot yourselves worse in the foot than you realize.
First you lost a bunch of respect about the Twitter documents, now you prove that you do not care about the accuracy of your stories as long as you get them out first.
TechCrunch depends on readers believing that what TechCrunch writes is true, and verifiably so.
I'll bet you the next feature that facebook launches will be thoroughly researched by you before you hit 'submit'.
Or did you not put some procedures in place after this fairly good example of a social engineering hack ?
Right, because websites regularly roll out fake features that need verification as to whether they actually exist or not? I wasn't contacting them to verify if it was real — clearly they were rolling it out to people (though obviously on a very limited basis). I was contacting them to figure out their logic for implementing such a bizarre feature.
> Right, because websites regularly roll out fake features that need verification as to whether they actually exist or not?
Well, you have one datapoint more now than you did last week ;) Lets hope the counter gets stuck at '1'.
> I wasn't contacting them to verify if it was real — clearly they were rolling it out to people (though obviously on a very limited basis).
Yes, why bother verifying something that even the first couple of posters on your site immediately classified as a hoax ?
5:29 original post
5:37, all of 8 minutes later, Rob Abbott: please tell me this is a joke
5:39: bad april fools joke, Stephen Ausman
5:41: Matt Harwood: I call hoax
So, if you consider it bizarre enough to contact them, your readers point out that it is in all likelihood a hoax you still contradict them.
After all, it so completely makes sense for facebook to implement this, what with the popular demand for this feature and all. After all, every 'expert' in the industry is well aware of the rise of fax usage between the users of social networks.
Elsewhere you say that facebook usually responds very well, and that a response within 10 minutes isn't unusual.
So, in spite of them normally responding amazingly fast you did not have the courtesy to wait for their response ?
Must be hard to let go of a scoop.
I'm really happy that if it would have been damaging that you would have at least waited a little longer and that you would have tried to contact more people. But effectively that says: "If it would have been damaging then we would have run it regardless". Just 20 minutes and a couple of emails later maybe.
Wow, that's way harsh. This wasn't a he said / she said piece of gossip. This was a feature that they saw on Facebook.com, that they reported. They are a tech news site and all.
Yeah, I can understand that. I wasn't trying to challenge your journalist integrity. As you noted, it wasn't a controversial piece. I was simply saying that trying for a comment in such a small time frame by email is pointless since a response in that time is very unlikely. I was thinking either a phone call or publishing right away as alternatives.
Actually Facebook tends to be quite responsive. They have a general press Email address that goes to something like ten PR people, so it isn't unusual to get a response within ten minutes (or at least a note saying that someone is looking into the issue).
The Facebook/TechCrunch litmus test of feature design:
- come up with crazy ass feature
- implement in the minimal possible way
- enable feature for techcrunch network only
- see if they write about it
- check comments on techcrunch
- response bad -> yank feature, nobody the wiser, response positive -> implement feature by pulling an all nighter.
I figure that pulling a TechCrunch will go down in to history as 'getting an online publication to write something terribly wrong to teach them a lesson about journalism and fact checking'.
Let's see how long it takes before someone else pulls a stunt like this on TC.
In one sense, this is why old print media is far superior to the mainstream online media today. You had to wait at least until the press started rolling the next morning before finalizing anything. A turn around time of days instead of minutes results in higher quality and accuracy in my opinion.
The existence of bad newspapers to do not make all newspapers bad. When all is said and done I still hold that there is not a blog or web site around that can measure up to the best print media when it comes quality journalism and writing.
To be fair... I'm sure they would have updated the post as soon as an official FB comment came in. That's one thing good about online media, it can get better over time.
On an unrelated note, why request a comment from a company at all if you're only going to wait 24 minutes for a response?