Mathew Ingram is the Communities Editor for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto. This transcript is part of an interview with Ira Basen for the CBC Radio Sunday Edition documentary News 2.0. Series air date on CBC Radio: Sunday, June 21 and Sunday, June 28, 2009.

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IB: So tell me what happened that morning in October.

MI: So I was on the train coming in from Rouge Hill which is where I live, on the GO train and usually I check Twitter to see what's going on, if there are any interesting links. That morning I checked my feed and I saw a link from Lorne Feldmen of 1938 media who I follow and he said Steve Jobs rushed to the ER, heart attack. So I clicked on the link and went to the CNN iReport and I thought this is pretty interesting and so I reposted it.

IB: Did the story seem more credible because it came from CNN iReport?

MI: When I saw the report at CNN iReport, I must admit I took it more seriously than if I had just gone to someone's blog. I saw what appeared to be a credible report , someone saying sources who were credible told them that this had happened . Typically that's how information comes out of Apple, they don't actually say things, but its inside sources so that sounded fairly credible to me, the fact that it said CNN probably made me give it a bit more credence than if it had just been somebody's blog. So I posted it and said "There's a report," just as simple as that. I can't say really whether I believed it or not. I mean it was literally just a sentence and I thought "this is interesting," it's interesting if it's true, it's arguable interesting even if its not true, which it turned out to be, pretty interesting. I think what happened quite quickly was people started re-tweeting it and reposting it , there were other people who had also been to CNN iReport, within a matter of minutes, people began saying this can't be true, or I know people at Apple and they said there's no such thing going on.

I'm pretty sure Henry Blogget was the first to call somebody at Apple and get through to them and they said no this isn't the case. Within about half an hour it had been shown to be false. That to me is a sign of journalism as a process working. You could take a snapshot of me, what I posted, what other people posted and say this failed because we repeated something that wasn't true. But of course that happens all the time , even in the traditional media. I mean wire services routinely report things that aren't true and then hopefully they correct them. It's the speed with which it gets corrected that's the important thing.

IB: So what happened next?

MI: What happened after I posted it was a number of people reposted it, a number of people expressed a whole pile of skepticism, a number of people said this is CNN iReport , it could just be someone trying to tank the stock. I immediately posted my own thought on twitter saying this COULD just be someone trying to tank the stock, if it is not a credible source then it could be someone just trying to jerk Apple around. So that started almost immediately after I had posted the original report. And then people started going back and forth, saying well I have sources at Apple who say this isn't the case.

I got criticized for posting it in the first place. Kara Swisher who runs all things digital said that I shouldn't have, that it was irresponsible of me as a journalist to do that. I argued that it was a simple sentence and that it was already being questioned by all sorts of people and that eventually the truth would come out, which it did.

I was off the train by that point, I was walking to the Globe and I stopped to check twitter responses and in fact sat there out in front of an office building and responded to a couple including Kara's because I thought it was an important point and I must admit I did feel kind of foolish for having posted it and that's why I wrote the blog post about it.

I thought I was interesting example of where journalism is now, where it is in terms of instant delivery mechanisms like twitter, where speed is more than or as important as accuracy. After I wrote the blog post I had a number of people respond and say that they didn't think I had anything to be sorry for at all and that they didn't assume that everything that I posted on my twitter account was a news release or was a fact that had been double sourced and checked. They took it very much in the spirit of this is something I came across, for better or worse, for good or ill, this is something interesting, which is the approach I was taking when I posted it.

IB: At that point, were you thinking of yourself as Mathew Ingram the blogger, or the Globe and Mail journalist?

MI: No I wasn't thinking of myself as a journalist. I was thinking what I typically think while I'm on twitter which is "this is interesting" which in a way I guess is a journalistic impulse. But it's obviously not me researching things and posting them and I think what this brought to light more than anything is the difference between how people perceive you on twitter. So some people perceived me as a journalist, as being Mathew Ingram of the Globe and Mail and so everything that I said on there, they expected that that was me speaking in my role as a journalist. But I had a whole pile of people say that they actually see me as a human being as well, not just a journalist and in some cases the things I post are just me talking or noticing something. But its interesting because the medium is so changeable in that sense, I mean I do work for the Globe and Mail and in some cases some of the things that I post are in an official capacity, but then there are lots of other things that aren't.

It's definitely one of the things I think about when I was writing the blog post. Am I a journalist for the Globe who's reporting things that people are going to trust because I've said them? I think there is an aspect of that. And to the extent that I mislead people, even for 10 or 15 minutes, about Steve Jobs, that makes me feel bad. I feel as though I dropped the ball. But at the same time I can't possibly check everything, especially when I'm sitting on the train. So does that mean I shouldn't repost things? To me there's a benefit there to being even just a distribution mechanism for interesting things. I can't possibly verify them all. And I think its foolish to even pretend that I could. So then the choice becomes either don't post any of these things until I can verify them, or rely on people to make their own judgments and research.

I think its important to recognize that we're all trying to find a happy medium between the old traditional world of media where roles were strictly defined and the way you communicated with readers or interacted with readers was very rigidly defined, and we're trying to experiment with new ways of reaching readers but allowing readers to reach us with information that's important. So I know that a lot of people said that report about Steve Jobs was the death knell for something like iReport but I didn't see it that way at all. I think, an I wrote a number of other posts about this, if you see journalism as a process rather than a product, than a specific thing that comes out at a specific time, if you see it as a process, than you're prepared to see all kinds of inputs into that process from journalists, from non-journalists, from anyone who is involved in an event and who even has a thought on an event and then at some point those things are verified and checked an tested and analyzed and aggregated and filtered and put in a context which is what journalists are supposed to do.

To me the process is more interesting than the product and I know we're not trained as journalists to think of journalism in that way because the artifact used to be the important thing, the piece of tape or the newspaper that came out in the morning, it was effectively etched in stone, it was unchangeable. That was dictated by the platform. That's not how news actually happens. News evolves and changes and is updated and I think that tools like Twitter and iReport allow that to happen, they're not infallible and any tool that involves human beings is going to be flawed so I think we have to recognize that. But that doesn't mean that those tools or that process is invaluable.

IB: Are you comfortable living in both a 1.0 and 2.0 world?

MI: I'm not just comfortable, I'm excited about living in both worlds. I think that the benefits of journalism 2.0 and seeing journalism as a process that continues, that never really has a beginning or end that as least if it has a beginning has no end, I think the benefits of that far outweigh the disadvantages of that. To me, the artificiality of what we used to do imposed all sorts of restrictions and limits and effectively tried to package news and put it in a box with a defined beginning middle story arc and all of those things which in many ways are artificial constructs designed to suit the needs of the medium instead of trying to be faithful to the story. And so the fact that online and all sorts of social media allow you to extend the story, expand the story, pull in new details about the story, update the story, I think all of those things are a huge benefit.

IB: This story got corrected quickly and no real harm was done, but what about all the other stories that don't get corrected. Is that not a problem when you publish before you filter?

MI: I think there's a risk of false information not being corrected, sure. But I think to be honest there's all sorts of misinformation in traditional media as well that never gets corrected, or if it does get corrected, it gets corrected on page 14 in a tiny little correction down at the bottom that's so opaque you can't even figure out what the mistake was to begin with. I think that's a bad thing. I think there's obviously a risk that things will go uncorrected, but my sense at least if you look at the way Wikipedia functions for example, people have deliberately tried to introduce errors into article and they get corrected surprisingly quickly by people who aren't even paid to do that. I think the potential for finding those mistakes and correcting them is infinitely larger than it was in traditional media. IB: If you had to take that day over again, is there anything you would do differently?

MI: I think if I were to do it again I would have waited and to tell you the truth, even when I was hitting enter or post, I was thinking this could be untrue. I think I probably would have waited until I was off the train, until I was at work, in front of a computer so I could go an look at the iReport. You know I might have would up posting it anyway. I've even gone back and looked at that blog post where I said I made a mistake, I'm not convinced I did. It feels like a mistake. But at the same time I think it showed something occurring, it was a tangible example, of a whole bunch of things: the risks of something like iReport, the real time nature of something like twitter, it sort of highlights a whole pile of issues in that gray area- what is journalism? What is newsworthy? When should you report things? That story could have just as easily hit the wire. It could have just as easily been a wire editor, and not me on twitter. Would that be a mistake? I'm not sure. I think the speed with which things can happens, there's going to be mistakes. People are going to post things quickly and it happens already. So twitter is just another way in which people can post things too quickly. Did I post that too quickly? I'm not sure. It looked credible. It looked as credible as lots of other things. I think its a tribute to something, that it got corrected as quickly as it did.

IB: But don't you think if it had been someone who works for a mainstream media organization who made that mistake, they would have lost their job pretty quickly?

I don't think so. It's happens routinely. I can think of half a dozen examples of reports that came from even less credible sources that got put on Bloomberg or Reuters or Dow Jones, that's the nature of trying to do things quickly. And I think what you have to do is make sure you have controls in place so that that's found quickly, so that you can do an update and say ignore. And I think twitter and blogs prove pretty conclusively that an erroneous report like that is only going to last 20 minutes.

IB: The mantra of social media and citizen journalism sites in particular seems to be that it is better to be first than right. Do you see that as a problem?

MI: They definitely do get caught up with speed and I think that's a real tension that we're seeing more and more of. It used to be that newspapers had lots of time to check lots of time to verify lots of time to think because it didn't have to come out until the next morning. But more and more we're racing to do exactly the same thing that the wire services are doing. We're having to get things up quickly because people want to know and if you get that early traffic, people start to come to looking for that and unfortunately there's a tension there between being first and being accurate and so on any given day you're going to err on one side or the other. You can be as accurate as you want, if you're late, people aren't going to come and read your story. Some will, but you may not get as must readership as you would if you had broken the story early. So I think there's a definite tension there that newspapers maybe aren't as used to dealing with, and we've had to decide on a case by case basis, do we go with it because it's new? Or do we wait and try and verify it? I mean the NY Times is doing the exact same thing they got a lot of flak for reporting something that was on a blog, it came from a single source, and it turned out later not to be true, about I think it was one of the Kennedys, and they quite publicly said we had that internal debate and we thought it's interesting, if true its potentially earth shattering news. We need to post it. So clearly they made the wrong choice.

IB: So do you see this whole incident as a triumph for Journalism 2.0?

I'm not sure I would call it a triumph of journalism 2.0, but you can look at it 2 ways. You can say iReport was wrong, people like me reposted it, compounding the error, and it took a long time to correct. But to me 20 minutes is really not that long. By the time I got to the office and sat down at my computer it had already been shown effectively not to be true. So is that a huge loss? I don't know. Someone said well if Apple's stock fell as a result of the that report, which it did, shareholders were inconvenienced, that's a tangible impact of a false report. And I don't want to downplay that in any way, but I think those things are going to happen. And the only thing that I regret is that I played a role in perpetuating something that was wrong. I would rather that didn't happen.