Ryan Chittum applauds the MSM:
From everything I saw all night from the West Coast, the press performed admirably. The Boston Globe had reporters on the scene and set up a liveblog to collect their tweets and pictures. It scooped that the suspects being pursued were indeed the marathon bombing suspects. The local TV news that I watched was measured and responsible, but broke news. WHDH was first to report, well before anyone else, that one of the suspects was dead.
… And then there were the keyboard crimefighters at Reddit. At one point a police dispatcher, apparently incorrectly, said that the suspects’ names were Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who disappeared last month, and Mike Mulugeta. Reddit, still smarting from the backlash to their amateur sleuthing, took a very premature victory lap.
Matthew Ingram argues that, despite some missteps, “having more sources is ultimately better”:
Yes, users of Reddit made mistakes — plenty of them, including identifying the wrong person as a suspect a second time on Thursday after erroneous information emerged from police scanners and other sources. But CNN and the NY Post have made plenty of mistakes as well, something Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t really mention in his post about how brilliant the traditional media was and how wrong Reddit has been. The larger point is that this isn’t an either/or situation — crowdsourcing is valuable, and has been valuable for journalism and will continue to be.
The Dish 