On Thursday, Felix Salmon wrote more about a quote, which was misquoted in a tweet (Poynter ran it in MediaWireWorld,) from the International Journalism Festival in Italy. In his talk there, Salmon spoke about explanatory journalism and why it doesn’t have to break news. He had more thoughts:
The argument for caring about such things is that news dissemination has become increasingly fragmented and social: if you have the news first, then your story gets a headstart on Twitter and Facebook, which is how more and more people are getting their news. But frankly while a headstart is nice, it should never make the difference between publishing and not publishing. Readers come first, and all decent publications have their own readership: they shouldn’t be so meek as to assume that their readers will have invariably found the same news elsewhere, just because someone else’s version arrived a little earlier.
