Those Deadlines Are Killers

Is the print media just trying to embarrass itself? Last week we had the Parade magazine cover featuring Benazir Bhutto as possibly "America's best hope against al-Queda" a week and a half after her assassination. This week, some of the British print press reported that Barack Obama had won the New Hampshire primary.

Sure, it's not as dismal as The Chicago Daily Tribune's "Dewey Defeats Truman headline (something The Independent also points that out, but more on that in a minute). But sixty years ago, you can assume that deadlines were even tighter, and cross-country communication wasn't completely reliable. Nowadays, however, I guess technology has has improved on the presses so that they can roll that much closer to delivery. Communication, even with a vast ocean between the two parties, is instantaneous. But that doesn't solve every eventuality. Sometimes you're not going to have what you need by press time. But in those cases, the correct answer is not to wager on one possible outcome coming to pass. Instead, if you don't have all the information, print what you can and promise to provide a full story as soon as possible.

One issue that may make this hard to address could be that newspaper editors and publishers don't want to acknowledge their limitations. I can understand that to some degree, but in an instance like this, their limitations are raised aloft for the world to see when they get such a highly visible story wrong. The Times, The Telegraph, and The Independent were the papers that put Obama on top, and for its part, The Independent didn't seem too concerned about that in its explanation the following day.

Our front page yesterday may, regrettably, have given the impression that Barack Obama had beaten Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary and was well on his way to sewing up the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. "Barack Obama's Incredible Journey," we called it.

To be sure, Mr Obama's journey thus far has been incredible.

What The Independent didn't point out is that the phrase "Barack Obama's Incredible Journey" was prefaced with: "Iowa . . . New Hampshire . . . America?" Take a look yourself. But they went on:

We could plead mitigating circumstances. The time difference works to the great disadvantage of the European and British press. Print deadlines gave us little choice but to trust the advance US polls. The unusually wide discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual vote became clear a good two hours after our final edition went to press. The exit polls were wrong; so was our gamble on Mr Obama.

At least this was only an early, if important, primary, and we were in the excellent company of most of the British press. It was hardly a howler like the Chicago Daily Tribune's 1948 headline, declaring that Dewey had defeated Truman for the presidency. Nor was it a CBS moment – when in 2000 the US network called Florida, and the presidency, for Gore.

Pointing out its mistake wasn't as bad as those others have made doesn't do much to mitigate it. And if that's your strategy, make sure you know what you're talking about. I'm not entirely sure what The Independent means by "a CBS moment." All the networks called Florida for Gore, then they all went back to undecided, then to Bush, and finally to undecided. We don't need to get into it here, but it's not at all clear that the networks were wrong in the first place.

The print press is obviously concerned about being scooped not just by TV but now by the Internet. They should stop worrying. The logistics and dynamics of the various media demands that they will be. When they do go to press with the wrong information, they have to take whatever steps they can to correct the story and mitigate the damage. Amy Gahran at Poynter Online sums up the reason why:

Expensive? Probably -- but when you're in a business where your key asset and selling point is credibility, it's far more costly to look like you either don't know or don't care what really happened.

Newspapers are having a tough enough go of it today as it is. They certainly don't need to do anything to make themselves even more irrelevant.