Micro blogs a means not an end

By Li Xing

China Daily, February 11, 2011

One of the top 10 phony news stories last year first appeared via micro blog, wrongly announcing the death of legendary kung fu novel writer Louis Cha. Another micro blog message falsely claimed that contemporary online literature was replacing modern literary works in school textbooks.

Hoax news can also spread like wildfire on the Internet, and not only in China. There were stories of a second volcano erupting in Iceland and that Caltech scientists predicted that a major earthquake was to take place in a matter of days last year.

Worst of all, since a lot of so-called news flashes appear in micro blogs with a limit of 140 Chinese characters per posting, some people conveniently use this to their advantage by creating sensational headlines without substantiating their claims simply to drive up their number of followers.

The sad thing is, traditional mainstream news media face the danger of losing sight of their own news values and ethics in order to woo the huge number of netizens and micro-bloggers. They often sacrifice their own news and reporting agendas and devote their resources to following up the bogus claims of micro blogs or other Internet outlets as "potential" news leads.

Editors and even reporters often rely on the Internet for news leads, instead of going to the grassroots in search of story ideas. There is more and more copying and pasting of Internet news.

As professional journalists, we welcome citizens joining us in reporting news. However, we should not shirk our responsibility in making sure we get right all the news elements: who, what, when, where, why and how.

Otherwise we are likely to lose our long-held journalistic values.

The author is assistant editor-in-chief of China Daily. E-mail: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn