A tale of caution

We start this week with a reminder that breaking news can be a dangerous career move. The Tabloid Watch blog is just one of many highlighting the resultant egg-on-face for hapless Daily Mail hack Richard Ashmore.

Ashmore fell foul of a spoof Twitter account set up for Apple CEO Steve Jobs and wrote a story based on one of the tweets. Not only did he apparently fail to spot the disclaimer, pointing out that the account was a parody, but also apparently failed to bother to check any basic facts with Apple themselves.

The article was swiftly removed when the error was pointed out. Now, it seems fairly clear that Ashmore has been a bit of a plonker for seemingly failing to do even the most basic of factchecking, but surely it also reminds us about the fine balance between good quality journalism and stealing a march on your competitors in a 24/7 digital age.

At a time where redundancies are rife and getting audiences for your advertisers seems paramount, you can feel a little spark of sympathy for someone thinking they'd managed to break what would have been a major scoop if only it were, um, even vaguely true.

So whilst Ashmore will probably have derisive laughter echoing in his ears for quite some time, perhaps we should take on board the lesson of the dire consequences when either time pressures or plain laziness stop you from doing your job properly.