Our unconfirmed report about Bocado car theft leads to changes in editorial policy
Creative Loafing’s Food Editor and main restaurant critic, Besha Rodell, wrote a thoughtful piece about journalistic standards within the blogging community.
As an example of bloggers getting it wrong, she pointed out that What Now Atlanta published an unconfirmed report that five cars were stolen from the Bocado parking lot Friday night when in fact, police confirmed only one stolen car.
While we qualified our original story by saying it was unconfirmed, Rodell was right–we shouldn’t have posted what turned out to be a rumor.
In our rush to be first (or in this case, second–we sourced the original five car theft from Foodie Buddha) we violated our own editorial policy of not publishing a story without confirmation from reliable sources. And for that, we apologize.
Moving forward, we will no longer use other blogs as sources unless they attribute their news with a quote or confirmation from a source outside their blog.
Thanks, Besha, for calling us out. We deserved it.
