Verify, verify and, when you have — verify some more!

The death of Michael Jackson proved again the immediacy of the web in reporting news.
It also illustrated how susceptible even news organizations can be in believing a report before independently verifying it to be true.
When reports broke that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital in Los Angeles, the race was on between traditional media outlets — most notable the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New York Times and CNN — and their cyberspace peers — most notable TMZ.com and myriad Twitter users — to be the first to declare Jackson dead or confirm a recovery.
As far as I can tell, TMZ.com was first to report the demise of the King of Pop, which is not surprising since TMZ has evolved from a celebrity-gossip website fighting with sites such as Defamer to becoming the leader in celebrity scoops.
Even as TMZ was reporting Jackson's death at the age of 50, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post were working on independent verification and had, at the same time as TMZ's declaration, Jackson in a coma.
From my viewpoint, it appeared as though the three organizations did what is supposed to be done in journalism — verify before publishing.
TMZ's focus is solely on celebrities; therefore, it stands to reason it would be ahead of the pack in reporting on celebrities since it likely has unparalleled sources in the field. The Times and Post, of course, are news organizations with a far more widespread mandate. If the story was a political scandal, TMZ wouldn't even be participating (providing the scandal was bereft of lewdness and any connection to Hollywood), while the Post and Times and various others would be on the case.
Now, so farm so good.
A celebrity icon falls ill and dies and new and old media are covering it the old-fashioned way, working contacts and publishing online by the minute as new information is gleaned.
However, amid this frenzy were what I would call Twidiots, those among us with Twitter accounts who began posting false reports of other celebrities dying this day.
Just before Jackson was rushed to hospital, Farrah Fawcett's death from cancer was announced, leaving June 25 as a momentous day in celebrity obituaries. Earlier in the week, Ed McMahon, the legendary sidekick to Johnny Carson, died.
Perhaps this trifecta of tragic news was too much for some Twidiots as word spread virally that actor Jeff Goldblum had died following a fall while filming a movie in New Zealand.
The odd thing is this rumour was quickly being reported as a rumour on various sites compiled by the Google news aggregator.
Harrison Ford was then offered up as dying and the whole thing got out of control.
Turns out Goldblum and Ford were and are very much alive and safely at home in America.
But the frenzied competition online means spurious rumours can become a line or two that resembles fact.
But such eagerness to not fall behind isn't limited to the web.
Our paper was caught in a similar situation this week concerning a story about a man who was assaulted and dropped off at Royal Inland Hospital here in Kamloops.
Details were scarce. All we knew was the man was in serious condition with head injuries, that a truck had been seized from the parking lot of a former strip club and that two people were being questioned by police.
Word soon got out that the man may have been shot in the head. Though the police would not comment on the nature of the man;s injuries, our reporter heard from some sources that the man had been shot, so we reported what we called an "apparent shooting."
Turns out the man had been beaten about the head, and not shot.
Even though we qualified the injury in our story by adding "apparent" to shooting, my headline stated it was a shooting.
And that's not good enough.
Sometimes in this business, with a deadline staring at you, you take a chance.
As the Chicago Tribune realized in 1948, Dewey did not defeat Truman.
And, as I found that this week, a beating is not a shooting.
You live and learn, and what we learned here is that verification will trump all else.