Quartz | The Washington Post
If you're on Facebook, you've probably seen this image by now, along with cheers about the message H&M is sending by using mannequins that look like real women.



But the picture isn't new, Jeff Yang writes in Quartz, and nor was it taken at H&M. Yahoo, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post were among the outlets that posted stories about the image. After learning the models weren't from H&M, Delia Lloyd of the Post said the image was a hoax. That wasn't quite right, either.

"Yesterday, I received an urgent Twitter message from Rebecka Silvekroon, a 29-year-old project manager for LBi, a digital communications agency based in Malmö in southern Sweden, asking for assistance in reaching Yahoo, one of the primary vectors of the image’s viral distribution," Yang writes. Silvekroon shot the photo in 2010 for her blog.

“I don’t know who originally found and took the photo from Becka.nu, but my guess is that they didn’t know Swedish and saw that I had written ‘H&M’ in the text, which caused the misattribution,” she says. “I found out about the reblogging via e-mail on Friday” — ironically, because Danish and Swedish newspapers had begun to write about the image, also without citing her blog, until someone Googled the text and found the original post on Becka.nu.

Lloyd's story now includes a mind-bending correction:

Correction: Earlier versions of this blogpost erroneously described the mannequins in question as an Internet hoax. They were not used in H&M stores, as the original online postings claimed. But they have been used at the Swedish department store “Åhlens.”

Yang salutes the photo for sparking discussion of body image in retailing. "It would be nice if it got reporters to start thinking about the rules of engagement around reuse of 'viral' images as well," he writes.

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The Guardian | The Atlantic | The New York Times | GigaOM
Shashank Tripathi was always a jerk on Twitter, Heidi N. Moore writes, but the BS he was pushing out to his @ComfortablySmug followers during Hurricane Sandy was only a problem after others, including journalists, started sharing it.

[I]f Tripathi's silly tweets made it into the national press, it is the national press that is, at heart, to blame for not protecting journalistic standards as well as they should. It is a matter of a few minutes to call a spokesperson or check a live camera, and that is what journalists get paid to do. Producers or editors should not rush information to air or print until those calls have been made, and answered.

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