A Twitter follower today recorded this exchange with the Chronicle and reporter Jason Bacaj using Storify:
It’s nice to know that our monitoring of Twitter and the other social networks pays off, whether that payoff is a tip for a story, a new source to contact or, in this case, a satisfied reader.
UPDATE, 10:52 AM: I heard back from the submitter a few moments ago. He said that he found out a short time after sending the photo to news outlets that it was actually his wife playing a prank on him. “It was definitely not a purposeful prank,” he said.
He said he was new to Montana and had no idea that the photo was not real. He apologized to the confusion and said he tried to contact everyone by email after the trick came to light, but he couldn’t get in touch with everyone in time.
Lessons learned all around, it seems.
Well, we thought we had what I call a “lightning strike,” a big, viral story online that gets a lot of attention and a lot of shares from our fans.
It was a photo sent in from our mobile app showing a mountain lion outside a set of double glass doors. The caption, written by a reader who identified himself only as Nick, said that the photo was taken “during Super Bowl by Bozeman deaconess.”
The app’s email to us at the BDC told me that it was sent in on Feb. 5, 2012, and its latitude and longitude, taken directly from the phone at the time of the submission, matched with a location near the hospital in Bozeman. It seemed legit.
I posted it to the paper’s Facebook page, and it was a hit. More than 100 shares and almost 90 comments. It was the biggest thing we’d posted to the social network in a long time.
Then there was some controversy.
First of all, when the photo came in to my email program, it was displayed quite small. I did not notice that there was a mouse cursor in the shot and that some of the distortion in the photo was clearly not just due to poor focus — it was due to the shot haven been taken of a monitor showing the mountain lion photo.
Then, a number of commenters noted that they had seen the photo before. One woman, Melanie Musson, said a coworker of hers at a nursing home near the hospital took it a year and a half ago.
Musson provided a link to the original photo, which Facebook says was posted on June 25, 2010. The link is here, though Musson said it was only going to be set to “public” for a short while.
A screenshot of the page is below.
By all appearances, the photo we received on Monday was a hoax, but I don’t think the story will be complete until I hear back from submitter Nick. I left a voicemail at the number from Nick’s email this morning. I will update this post if Nick replies.
I took the photo down from Facebook late last night and posted a notice about it.
So what went wrong? I didn’t open the photo and glance at the full-size image. I probably would have seen the mouse cursor in the shot, and that might have been a red flag. I had checked the meta data first, and the GPS coordinated checked out. That means that, hoax or not, the iPhone uploading the photo was located in the right spot — geographically near the hospital in Bozeman. On top of that, there was no way I could have known the photo had been posted to Facebook before.
The trouble came when I didn’t call Nick. I put a measure of trust in the people who submit videos and photos to the Chronicle, and perhaps that trust is ill-advised or misplaced. I like to think that the photos people take the time to send us are real, but that is clearly an assumption I can no longer afford.
Admittedly, I probably never should have had that trust, but sometimes you think you know things that you don’t.
It’s not what I would call the most efficient use of a newspaper’s website, but the Vancouver Sun published the story anyhow.
It seems that, according to a survey conducted by Zoomerang for the dating website Match.com, users of Android phones “more likely to have sex on a first date and partake in one-night stands.”
According to the survey, which interviewed 1,068 Canadian singles between Oct. 13 and Oct. 15, 62 percent of single Android users reported having had sex on a first date. A further 55 percent had one-night stands.
That compares to 57 percent of iPhone users and 48 percent of Blackberry users who reported having had sex on a first date.
After actually looking at the story, the headline “Android users more likely to have sex on first date: Survey” is grossly misleading. The survey doesn’t predict future behavior. It only reports past actions.
Frankly, I identify with the user Jeremia the Bullfrog who posted this comment on the story:
It is stupid that this is even in the “newspaper”. 1068 people does not provide a descent sample group. And a internet poll? come on you dont need to print every piece of cra p that comes down the wire!But maybe that’s just me.
What’s been your experience with Android users? Are they sluttier than most?
