(Guest post from Frank Mungeam, Director of Digital Media for KGW.com in Portland, OR)
“Epic battle between cows, bear caught on cam.”
The headline was a web site manager’s page view dream, and when a Eugene, Oregon TV station posted the story to its site, it took less than 24 hours to be republished by ABC and AP affiliate web sites nationwide.
The only problem was that the person and the place in the story were both wrong, exposing countless stations to potential liability for copyright infringement. How it happened is a valuable lesson to anyone in the content publication and aggregation business in a new world where social media accelerates viral stories.
The Eugene station that did the original story got their hands on a couple of amazing “cows vs. bear” photos showing cows head-butting and stomping a bear cub that tried to snatch a calf. The images came via an email, suggesting the clash happened in Oregon. The TV station got a generic rancher on camera to comment on the pictures. But the wording of the on-air and online story was ambiguous – enabling the false impression that the rancher took those photos.
Soon enough, like that old campfire game where you whisper in the ear of the person next to you, the truth quickly became distorted. By the time AP picked up the video and re-tracked it, the commenting rancher had become the witness and photo owner, with everyone from ABC News to the Washington Post and LA Times repeating the error and promoting the story via social media.
In fact, the epic battle happened in British Columbia, Canada and the rancher interviewed on camera had nothing to do with the incident. When I tracked down Wayne Ray, the BC rancher who actually photographed and witnessed the event, he said he’d spent the better part of two days trying to “un-ring the bell,” contacting AP and others to get the inaccurate story pulled. Trying to help him out, I discovered first-hand how hard it was to find a way to alert major mainstream media sites like the washingtonpost.com and ABC News of their online error. Here’s the correct story on KGW.com.
That BC bear got quite a wake-up call when he tried to snatch a calf from a very protective mother. And web site managers should remember the risks when snatching up other sites’ re-tracked stories. If nothing else, media site managers need to make sure it’s crazy-easy for users to submit “corrections” – for our own protection!
