9. Decision Point

Hudes, MacDonald and Hood were on deadline and had to make the decision of whether to include information from the Facebook page in the National Post’s June 4 coverage of the shooting. Hudes was working late into the night and it was still unconfirmed whether the Facebook page belonged to the same Justin Bourque whom […]

8. Omitting the Unverified: Joel Eastwood and the Toronto Star

While Hudes and National Post editors were deciding whether or not to include an unverified Facebook page in their story, Joel Eastwood was having a similar debate in another newsroom in the city. [1] Eastwood was working as a general assignment reporter for the Toronto Star in 2014. When reports of a shooting in New […]

7. Balancing Immediacy and Verification

The editors of the National Post faced a classic journalistic dilemma: speed vs. accuracy. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write, “In the context of gathering news, speed is almost always the enemy of accuracy.” [1] While this may be true, journalists should not simply discount speed in economic terms as a means of “scooping” competing […]

1. ‘My Kingdom Will Come:’ 2014 Moncton Shootings

At around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, June 4, 2014, the New Brunswick RCMP were notified of an armed man, dressed in camouflage, walking in the Moncton suburb of Glen Cairn. Locals reported the sound of gunshots; shortly thereafter, there were reports that five RCMP officers had been shot, three fatally. By midnight, police had locked […]

Facebook Faceoff: Active shootings and social media verification

Case Study by Casimir Boivin, Avneet Dhillon, David Greenberg and Kayla Rosen February 2017 Introduction In the summer of 2014 Sammy Hudes was working as an intern at the National Post. On June 4 news broke that there had been a shooting in Moncton, N.B., that left three RCMP officers dead and two others wounded. [1] The police […]