This week I seem to be getting an eyeopener on how ‘news’ on the internet works and how much of the so called hype factor is involved. Where reporters used to check their sources, nowadays it seems that everybody is copy pasting away.

I am talking about the latest news hype about Adobe’s flash player on the iPhone (long awaited it seems). I was there during the session on Flash On The Beach when Paul Betlem was talking about this. A question from the audience about them supporting it got the answer that they can and will, as long as it is allowed by Apple (actually, that seemed to be the only thing holding them back).

The funny part (for me) is in the fact that I was looking at how this story evolved. I believe the session was on tuesdag, people (was it flashmagazine.com?) were informing other visitors of Flash On The Beach by using Twiter. They also posted about it on flashmagazine.

Soon others were quoting the message on twitter, other sites took over the blog post and before I knew it and came back in Holland (wednesday night), the news was all over the place. Now all these other (major!) news sites have no way of knowing what has been said other than if they had some people they know over there (could be, but doubtfull since there were only like 80 people in the session). So the only conclusion I can make is that most newssites are just looking at what other sites have to report, and take that as input, using them as sources and therefor place them in the ‘facts’ categories.

How easy it is for someone to just make stuff up, do a little bit to spark a fire and let the lazyness of other news sites do the rest.

Just for clearity. The article on flashmagazine.com is absolutely true, nothing wrong with this particular story. It was just an eyeopener for me on how these stories develop.