Being on the receiving end of criticism isn’t often very fun. It can be helpful, though, and it can be constructive.
But again, it isn’t often very fun.
A couple of weeks ago, Sudbury.com ran a news release from the Greater Sudbury Police Service about a local man who had been charged for violating the Quarantine Act.
We had questions about the report, as we often do, but police opted not to name the man who was charged, so there wasn’t much we could do to answer those questions immediately.
We wrote up the story and ran it based on the information provided by police. This is standard practice.
We consider police a reliable source, much like we consider Public Health Sudbury a reliable source, or the province a reliable source. It means when a group we consider reliable issues a news release, we can give the information therein the benefit of the doubt.
Groups like the police have checks and balances in place. For police, one of those checks and balances is the courtroom. When police issue a release about a murder, we run with it because it is unlikely police would invent news of a murder.
Plus, for a major crime like that, we as a news organization will follow the case through the courts. We’ll find out, as nearly as possible, what actually happened.
After we ran the story about the Quarantine Act violation charge — in which the person charged was not named remember — the man’s wife commented under the story post on our Facebook page, criticizing us for not reporting the truth.
This led to an avalanche of online criticism, emails and comments sent through the website, attacking our decision to run the press release without fact-checking.
As I said, criticism is fair, but this incident provides an opportunity to discuss how we do journalism and why we were justified in running the release.
It turns out, based on extensive work from our health reporter Len Gillis, that the fellow likely shouldn’t have been fined in the first place. You can read Gillis’ story here.
It’s important to note it would have been impossible to fact-check the story had the man’s wife not outed him on Facebook, so we owe her thanks for doing that. Her forthrightness provided us the chance to do some journalism.
I’m going to expand on this in an upcoming column, but the message I want to share is that, while news moves fast, journalism can take time. And while an initial story might seem to point in one direction, thorough investigation can send it in an entirely other direction. It requires diligence, curiosity and, above all maybe, patience.
