'News is a verb.' The case for reading daily and with intention

Last week, I received a couple of text messages, chiding our coverage of hastily called county commission meetings to approve memorandums of understanding for the four Bullock County wells to supply water to the Hyundai Metaplant in Bryan County.

You can read that coverage right here >>

Official: Water permits for wells to supply Hyundai plant to be approved 'in a few days'

Water Issues: Feds should have known – and been told – of water demands for Hyundai site, experts say

The sender of said text messages (not a public official) was privy to an email sent to our reporter John Deem by a county official, which raises some interesting questions on its own. But, the sender suggested we were purposefully leaving out information contained in that email. The reality was our reporter was confirming through other sources a statement contained in that email.

Because that's what we do: As reporters, we do not take simply what someone tells us, official or not, we confirm it with at least one other source, preferably two. That's an old-school methodolgy in journalism, to triangulate information to ensure accuracy, which may make us antiquated and slower in this instant-gratification-takes-too-long era. It's essential, however, because our job is accountability on behalf of the public, and we have a commitment to accuracy (case in point: we've uncovered scrivener's errors in court records that could jeopardize indictments just by checking the spelling of a name and the date of an incident.)

The late, great journalist Pete Hamill wrote a small book in 1998 called " News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. " In it, he derided the decline of the American newspaper and called upon them to get out of the business of being "first" to being better, more accurate, to pay attention to the vital issues impacting their communities, and reaching out to marginalized voices ― the people impacted by decisions, not just the decision-makers.

I would add that news, like science, is iterative. We only know what we know at any given moment through research, observation, interviews and questioning. The reality is, too, we all need to ask better questions. We try to take our time to dig, even when the pressure builds to get a story out. Then, when new information becomes available, or an open records request reveals deeper background, or a new witness comes forward and is willing to talk, we add to the story so that a fuller sense of the facts are made clearer to the reader.

Then, it's up to you to make up your mind how to respond.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: 'News is a verb.' The case for reading daily and with intention