• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, September 16, 2010

Everyone who grew up with newspapers also grew up with the maxim "Don't believe everything you read." Over the past week or two, we've seen a number of news stories in both mainstream media and across the Web (redistributing the mainstream media stories) recounting how a New Hampshire burglary ring supposedly used Facebook to identify people who were traveling and whose homes were unoccupied, then robbed them.

Most of the stories -- and virtually all of the headlines -- led readers to believe that burglars' use of Facebook and other social media was the primary driver of the 50-house crime spree. Headlines included, "Facebook Users Post Whereabouts, Get Burglarized," and "Police: Thieves Robbed Homes Based on Facebook, Social Media Sites." A number of stories tried to link the burglaries to a new location-based feature on Facebook called Places.

The suggestion of those stories -- and particularly those headlines -- was false. Noted blogger and "new" journalism professor Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com did a little spade work of his own over the past day or two. Like most good journalists, he decided to go directly to the purported source of the stories, the police, to see what they had to say. Apparently, the burglars were not canvassing Facebook looking for unoccupied homes. In only two of the 50+ burglaries did they look at Facebook, and each of those cases involved victims who were "friends" of one or more of the burglars. It's hardly the kind of Facebook-borne crime spree that those many media outlets tried to sensationalize and unfairly peg fault to Facebook.

Is this a new problem? Of course not. Journalists and media companies (and headline writers) have been getting stories wrong for centuries. It's part of the business. It comes with the territory.

However, what is new -- thankfully -- is that stories like this now must stand the test of time, and the scrutiny of millions, many of whom have better information or more time and attention for getting the story right, even if it takes days, weeks or months. Millions now have access to "digital" printing presses. In the old days, the damage would be done, and getting it undone would be very hard, because those with the printing presses were also the ones that made the mistakes to start with -- and they weren't very incented to call out their own mistakes.

There is still the danger of folks (especially teens) catching a headline on the fly and passing on the misinformation at Internet/social media speed as if it were true. But we should have all learned by now that we need to read multiple accounts of important news (especially online) in order to have a sense of what really happened.

Meanwhile, thank you, Jeff Jarvis and thanks to the millions of you who blog and tweet. You can't always believe what you read, but at least now you're much more likely to learn whether it was really true or not. That makes me feel very good about the future of journalism in a digital media world. How about you?