Where in the World is Bloomberg?
Bloomberg news, which was chastised for using Baghdad datelines on its war stories even though it had no reporters there, has suddenly decided it will use NO datelines at all, according to this Reuters story.

It's a weird way to solve the problem. That said, there has been rampant dateline abuse by many news organizations for years. The way I learned it in college is you only use a dateline if the reporter was actually there. "There" is of course the location of the best action -- the fire, the shooting, the earthquake. Over the years I've been told by editors to use the good dateline if there was a photographer there, or if a press release originated from there or if a completely unreliable stringer whose information we couldn't use was there.

I guess in this era of Jayson Blair mea culpas, news agencies are wisely using this time to fix a lot of the grey-area dirty-little-secret stuff they've had as de facto policy over the years. I guess the thinking is that whatever they admit to right now still pales in comparison to what the New York Times is having to fix. I vote for a long and painful confessional period in hopes that a lot of dirty laundry is aired and lessons learned.
- posted by Amy @ 5/28/2003 01:06:00 PM