Regional Editor, Patch.com
Those who are ‘media literate’ have developed a taste for what makes an information source worthy of their trust.
by Kurt Greenbaum
A few months ago, my son started to come to the dinner table filled with amazing facts to stun and amaze his parents and his older sister.
For example, he informed us that anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. And that you’re more likely to die on your way to purchase a lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery.
Finally, one day, when one of the facts he spilled out sounded too hard to believe, I had the presence of mind to ask: How did he know all this? Where had he found this information? He was pleased to tell me: A website called OMG Facts.
Great, I said. But where did OMG Facts get the information? Well, it turns out that readers post tidbits of this sort. Sometimes they’re sourced. Sometimes they’re not. The site describes itself as “a top entertainment destination (that) features the most interesting facts on the Internet as voted by its audience.”
I started nagging him to know the source of the “facts” he poured out to us at the dinner table. How did he know it was reliable? Would he be willing to include any of those facts in a school paper, using OMG Facts as a source? My son, I could tell, was getting annoyed with me. The flow of facts became a trickle. Soon, the faucet shut tight.
And I finally had a clear understanding of what “media literacy” was all about it.
IT’S NOT JUST THE KIDS
For a time, my father would pass along emails that crossed his inbox, emails that included interesting, bizarre or alarming pieces of information. He passed along the news, for example, that you should be extremely careful with your magnetic card key when you visit a hotel. Those keys, the email said, contain personal information; losing it could leave you vulnerable to identity theft.
I looked it up on Snopes.com, a website devoted to debunking urban myths, and found an article declaring the story false. The Snopes article was well written, laced with links to supporting information and, at the bottom of the page, punctuated with an index of sources, including “Good Housekeeping” magazine, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and “Computerworld” magazine.
I forwarded the Snopes link to my father — as I had with a handful of similar emails. He always thanked me for the additional information.
Now, he’s become me. He reads the stuff his friends forward to him, he makes a judgment about whether or not it has the ring of truth, he looks it up on a reliable source and he replies with rebuttals and corrections.
The Internet has turned us all into information detectives. It’s not enough to find information; we have to evaluate its source.
BUILDING A SITE WORTHY OF THE LITERATE
In July 2010, I left the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a name with 133 years of history, to work for Patch.com, a national network of hyper-local news and community information websites. We have 24 Patch sites in the St. Louis area.
To loyal readers and faithful St. Louisans, the Post-Dispatch name carries some weight. For better or worse, they know what they’re going to get and I’d like to think that for the most part, they trusted that the journalists of the P0st-Dispatch had the interests of their readers at heart.
At Patch, we’re relative newborns. Every word we write, every interview we conduct, every story we choose says something about whether we’re a reliable source of community information. In less than a year, readers are sending signals that they believe we are. I wish I knew what magic juice makes the difference.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re not a faceless website, that the people who make it happen show up at community festivals, city council meetings and high school football games.
Or maybe it’s because we strive to be accurate every day, but we admit when we’re wrong and we try to give credit where it’s due. Or maybe it’s because we strive to be transparent about who we are, what we believe and how we do our jobs.
Whatever it is, it’s magic juice that you’ll only appreciate if you understand media literacy. When you can look at a piece of information, evaluate its source and satisfy yourself that it’s reliable — well, that source has the magic juice, and the consumer of that information knows what it tastes like.
GETTING THE TASTE
Today, my son still occasionally comes to the table with an irresistible piece of trivia, but now, he hastens to cite the source before he’s asked. And he’s more discerning about the sources he cites.
A few days ago, he announced that Facebook was abuzz with rumors about pop pair Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez. Was she pregnant? He combed the web in search of sources he could believe and satisfied himself that no, the young couple had not just short-circuited their careers.
It makes a father proud.
And by the way, in case you were wondering: anatidaephobia isn’t a real phobia. It was made up by Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side comic. You won’t find the word listed on the list of phobias published by the Oxford Dictionaries’ website. You will find it in the list on Wikipedia — under “Jocular and Fictional Phobias.”
Kurt Greenbaum is a regional editor for Patch.com, the hyper-local news and community information source that launched locally about a year ago and nationally in 2009. Previously, he was an assistant city editor and online news director for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and online mid-Atlantic general manager for Media General. He has been been involved with online journalism since 1997 and has been an editor or reporter for an online news start-up and the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. He lives in Chesterfield with his wife Janis and son Matthew; his daughter is a sophomore at Missouri State University.
