Ted Vaden (N&O) took a look at MSM via Jay and Lex’s session at ConvergeSouth. I tried to read it after the opening sentence that took me by surprised…
“N.C. A&T State University, with The Greensboro News & Record, hosted the conference, called ConvergeSouth…”
I suppose if you want to get the facts right, you have to dig a little deeper than Vaden’s opening salvo that is, well, simply wrong. And yes, I think I took that a little personally. ConvergeSouth was brought to you by the people and businesses and foundations of Greensboro.
FWIW, ConvergeSouth was brought to you by a team of volunteers, starting with Ed Cone and me. We paid for it through active fundraising from Greensboro-area foundations. A&T, a gracious host, contributed monies to pay for travel for Friday Journalism speakers. All other costs were paid for by donations from the Tannenbaum-Sternberger Foundation, Joseph M. Bryan Foundation, JP Financial (we’re going to miss them!), the News & Record Foundation (which isn’t the paper), individuals (Ed, Al Barnett, Jr., and me), and through in-kind donations from Greensboro businesses including Carolinanet, Symetri, companies that do lights & sound, CFGG, and favorable pricing for events from restaurants, hotel, hard work from the barbecue guys, and lots of people who just helped do the work that hardly gets noticed but is critical to a conference’s success.
I have trouble reading “news” when the initial facts are wrong. The rest of Ted’s article was decent enough. Go and read.
Don’t you hate it when things are fact-checked? Hrm. I wonder if I should downgrade N&O on credibility watch. :p
It was a bit more than I could take early this morning – I don’t usually get that defensive, but the conference is somewhat near and dear to my heart. In fact, I did a fair amount of work getting Ted that video / audio from his session, too, last week so he could get things accurate. Oh well. It’s not the worst problem in my week. (If it were, it’d be a great week!)
Sue fact-checks the N
And you wonder why they (MSM) don’t get it….
I live in a little world without the desire to look too far beyond the borders. So I have not seen or read everybody. Of the newspapers that I am familar with, only John Robinson at the News & Record “gets” it. UNC-CH’s Phil Meyers said it in Fridays session, there will be no more readers of papers by 2043 (October I think). Bloggers challenge the media to be better, and when they don’t comply, people say good-bye!
I think the objections raised at ConvergeSouth by some of the traditional media that they are somehow better arbiters of the truth and more careful with the facts are coming into clear relief this week. Quite hilariously. First we have a N&O columnists basing the foundations of her argument on a misquote of Jay Rosen, then we have WFMY misreporting elections results in a most egregious manner, now Vaden’s error — all within one week — and all corrected by the citizen journalists.
N&O Credibility downgraded
Disclaimer: I was one of the conference organizers that happened to be peeved enough to see this after Sue mentioned it. Eat your heart out. Interestingly enough, how you participate in a conference and not know who organized the event…
The conference was well worth all the efforts in my eyes.