Yes, it IS my job to stir trouble

Sometime fairly recently, the question has changed. It no longer seems relevant to ask people how they prefer to consume news and information, that is, in printed newspapers or on digital sites.

Now what seems more important is how well sourced our news will be and, just as importantly, whether it will be vetted.

Let me give you an illustration from this weekend:

About 5:30 Sunday morning my cell phone rang. Leon County Sheriff Office deputies were on the scene of a shooting on Lake Bradford Road.

I woke Local News Editor Rebeccah Cantley, who headed to the scene while I posted breaking-news alerts and initial reports on Tallahassee.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com.

Let’s face it: As a trained journalist with 30-plus years in the business I simply did what you or any other citizen could have done on that first report or, for that matter, a deputy could have done himself on a government Web site.

But in a short while, Cantley was on the scene, and that’s when the paradigm changed. It was at that point the journalist used her training to ask and gather information that official sources may not have provided as readily. She called me often to add greater detail as I updated the story on the Web. That process has continued since that story broke, with other reporters, editors and photographers taking over.

When she arrived, Cantley found about 150 people on the scene of the shooting, most – if not all, these days – with the ability to post quickly to any of a myriad of Web sites the same information I had posted in my initial report. No doubt, some did.

During the course of our reporting on this story – and most others, for that matter – our reporting moved quickly away from reliance on official sources for all our information, asking ourselves what are we not being told, what is missing, what makes sense and what doesn’t.

At the same time, on Tallahassee.com, our readers – armed with our reporting – did the same thing with us, questioning and discussing our reporting.

But it didn’t have to be that way, did it? Is an independent, mass-audience news source such as Tallahasse.com that important anymore, what with everyone able to report local news these days?

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