We’ve had two big local news stories over the last week and a half.  One was about a local TV news anchor who allegedly drove drunk, ran over a man and killed him and the other was about a Boy Scout who got lost in the woods for three days.  The latter became a national story and happily the Boy Scout was found alive today and reunited with his family.

An interesting thing happened with the first story.  A few days after Tolly Carr allegedly commited the crime of driving while intoxicated and running over a pedestrian rumors started floating around that Carr had commited suicide.  We heard it from our son, who’d heard it from his bus driver, who in turn heard it from a friend via a cell phone call.  We checked the news and saw nothing about it and quickly we forgot about it.  The next day I was reading the blog of Ken Otterbourg, the Winston-Salem Journal’s managing editor, and he posted a piece about the rumor, how many phone calls they received about it and the effort they made to run it down.  What made this so interesting is that the rumors never made the newspaper itself, but because he has a blog that discusses the inner workings of the newspaper Otterbourg was able to "cover" the rumor from the paper’s perspective.  It was fascinating to me that the rumor had become so widespread that the newspaper had to investigate, and it was also of interest to see how a professional news organization handles such a case.

The Boy Scout story generated some interesting developments as well.  I was in the barber shop when one of the news reports mentioned that the boy had been left behind with one of the counselors while the rest of the group went for a hike.  One of the men in the barber shop instantly said, "Why they leavin’ a young boy alone with a Scout leader like that? I think we have an idea why that boy might have run off."  The implication, of course, was that the scout leader had been doing something untoward with the boy and the boy fled the scene.  Later that evening I was catching up on my blog feeds and I noticed that one had a post about the Boy Scout case and made the same assertion that the barber shop patron had made.  The difference, of course, is that the blog was out there for the world to see and from my own experience I knew this post would be read by others and the writer would be taken to task for publishing such accusations without a shred of proof.  Since I consider the writer a friend I was going to write him and advise him that he might want to re-think the post, but when I clicked the link for the post it had already been taken down.  It turns out Ed Cone had beaten me to the punch, as he writes in his post Local Blogging and Responsibility.

I can’t help but notice the relationship between these two cases.  One features a mainstream newspaper editor using a newly found tool, his blog, to delve into the evolution of a rumor and how his organization deals with it.  The other features an "amateur" writer with a local readership and a newly found responsibility to think twice before tapping "publish" or risk becoming intimately familiar with the terms libel and slander.  Somewhere in there I think we’ve found the face of local news in the future.