By Mallary Jean Tenore and Steve Myers 

Persistent rumors of Fidel Castro's death are testing newsrooms with a familiar quandary: At what point do you report on rumors?

The tradition, of course, is that you don't. Journalists check rumors with official and unofficial sources and only report verifiable information.

Charles Tasnadi/AP Rumors about Castro's death have presented newsrooms with challenges about how to respond. This photo was taken during a March, 1985 interview at his presidential palace in Havana.

But what if bloggers are telling people the Cuban leader is dead?  What if parents are calling schools to see if their children will be dismissed early, local leaders are discussing how they will respond and your high school friends and your air-conditioning repairman is calling the newsroom with supposed details of Castro's passing?

For South Florida, Castro's death would be as much a local story as an international one (this column was actually published a year ago, during a previous run of Castro-is-dead rumors.)

So when word of Castro's death started spreading again last Friday -- the third Friday in a row -- newsrooms checked it out. They called on their sources locally and in Cuba, considered how the rumors were affecting their communities and decided whether the issue was worth reporting even though the rumors remained unconfirmed.  

"Obviously the most credible sources are ones that are on the record -- that's always the goal we're looking for," said Dave Wilson, managing editor/news at The Miami Herald. When reporting on Cuba, "that's difficult to achieve, especially when you’re talking to people on the island. For them to go on the record is literally an incredible peril."

In such cases, the Herald has had to use anonymous sources that have proven credible in the past. Some questions that Wilson said the Herald asks when considering whether to use anonymous sources include: How close are the sources to the information? How credible are they as sources? What are their qualifications? Are there other sources the paper could also contact?

From Miami to Havana, journalists didn't find anything concrete to back up the word on the street. Cuban government sources had assured AP reporters that nothing had changed, said Terry Spencer, Florida news editor for the AP. (Poynter's attempts to reach the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C., for an update were unsuccessful, but an AP report dated Monday, August 24, quoted foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque as saying "Fidel is doing very well.") The next question was what to do. Several outlets decided that the rumors had stirred the community so much that it was worth reporting a story about the unconfirmed reports.

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"[The rumors] create buzz, they create responses in places like Miami, so even though they're rumors, they're also news. I think that because the rumors get so much bounce and they get talked about and they move quickly, we treat them as news," said Tim Connolly, national/foreign editor at The Dallas Morning News, which had a bureau in Cuba from 2001 to 2006.

Journalists with The Miami Herald and NBC 6 News in Miami said they did not find any truth to the rumors, but did think it was important to report on how the rumors were affecting those who heard them.

Tom Llamas, a reporter with NBC 6 News, said that he received about 20 phone calls. The calls came from, among others, his air conditioning man and high school friends who called to tell him they had heard Castro was dead.

"They all thought the media had the answers," said Llamas, who reported on how the Cuban community in Little Havana responded to the rumors. "We quickly realized it was a rumor getting out of control." 

Similar to NBC 6 News, The Miami Herald ran a story about the impact the rumors were having in the Cuban-American community. "I had some concerns that anything we would write would just promote the rumors," said Juan Tamayo, chief of correspondents at the Herald. "But I think this was the perfect occasion to deal with the rumors and at least knock them down, at least as far as you could."

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel also reached similar conclusions about the truth of the rumor. The paper did not run any stories about the rumors in print, but did run a related Associated Press story on its Web site. "It did not seem to be anything that warranted a story," said Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the paper.

Simply put, she said, the newspaper followed through on its obligation to vigorously pursue such tips, but "generally we don't write about rumors. … When the paper reports on it, it won't be rumor."

The Associated Press decided that after three weeks, the rumors had reached a level that made them worthy of reporting, Spencer said. Editors there had similar concerns about spreading misinformation, but Spencer said "the way to avoid that was to make it clear from the get-go that the rumor is not true."

That approach is appropriate for the current environment in which news organizations are not the sole sources of information, said Poynter Institute Ethics Group Leader Kelly McBride.

Screengrab from googlenews.com

The issues for journalists to consider, she said, are what effect the rumor is having on the community and whether there's a journalistic purpose to reporting on it. "If it's having a huge impact or even a moderate impact, and you have determined to the best of your professional ability that it’s not true, I think there’s an obligation to say what you know."

And she said, journalists must not shy away from what they don't know. "I think we have to say that with pristine clarity and honesty," she said. "That's not something we're accustomed to doing as journalists."

Al Tompkins, broadcast/online group leader at Poynter, wrote in an e-mail that the rumors warranted coverage because of the uncertainty surrounding Castro's condition. "... The continuing rumors feed the anxieties, especially of Cuban Americans who have families in Cuba," Tompkins said. "Journalists should weigh the question of how much harm reporting on the rumors will do compared to how much harm not mentioning them would cause."

So what will happen if rumors wash through Miami again on Friday, for the fourth week in a row?

"The Friday afternoon rumor mill has now occurred about three times. We're curious, and we're not entirely sure what to make of it," said Wilson from the Herald, noting that he's not sure why the rumors keep spreading on Fridays. "The pent-up emotion and anticipation in Miami is palpable, and when there's something like that in the community, we try to go out and write about it and report it."

Readers were responsive to the story, Wilson said, judging by the spike in the Herald's online page views. The paper had been averaging about 50,000 page views per hour (as collected at 4 p.m.) during the week leading up to the last batch of rumors. After an article about Castro's rumored death was posted last Friday in that time slot, the number jumped to about 73,000.

Spencer said he's not sure how the news eventually will come out. "We have to take these rumors seriously, but we also have to take them with a grain of salt because so far, every one of them has been wrong. But some day, one of them will be right." 

Chart courtesy of Miami Herald Web traffic for The Miami Herald peaked at 4 p.m. just after the paper posted a story about Castro's rumored death. The lines on the graph represent the comparative traffic for the previous day (yellow) and the previous week (green).