Truth Before Speed

When I went to work at my first a.m. daily newspaper well over 20 years ago, the 10 p.m. deadline was sacrosanct in the newsroom. This was a small city in Arizona, the local TV news operations were not that sharp, and if something didn't make it in the paper one day, it could easily wait until the next, because we had no real competitors to worry about scooping us.

Obviously, every nook and cranny of the news business has changed — even Tradeshow Week. We do have competition; most of you know who they are and read them too. Since long before I arrived on the scene, Tradeshow Week has had the advantage, because it was, well, a weekly and could deliver the news to its readers more quickly than the magazines that show up in your mailbox every month or so.

Now — and stop me if you've heard this one before — the Internet has changed everything. The methods vary, but every news organization in the world has at least one way or another to deliver information to readers electronically. That includes us, and our competitors.

For now, it's our practice to place breaking news online as it develops, then follow up in more detail a few days later in the magazine. If something is of particularly urgent news value to our readers, we send an e-mail to those who subscribe to our E-mmediate news service.

Our competitors are out there uploading what they consider news to their Web sites too. I can't speak to how many of you are checking them; but I do know that we get an enormous number of visits to our Web site every day.

I also can't speak to our competitors' news judgment or the decision-making process they use in determining what is newsworthy and what isn't. But let me address one recent story to make a point about Tradeshow Week's judgment and process.

If you happened to click on tradeshowweek.com a few minutes after 9:38 a.m. on Aug. 8, you would have been one of the first to learn that Wasserstein & Co. had picked up Primedia's business information unit for a cool $385 million. I know our competitors eventually got the news to their Web site visitors too. I don't know when; only that it was later.

Now, if you'd been watching the Web sites of our competitors — and at least one more player, a magazine that covers the larger business-to-business media — about a week earlier, you would have been told that another company was on the verge of purchasing the Primedia assets. That information came to us just as I assume it did to the others: from a third-party source not involved with the deal who preferred to speak off the record.

That source's information also happened to be wrong. The b-to-b Web site I mentioned earlier went to the trouble a couple hours later of sending a correction via e-mail to all its subscribers. And the error-ridden news item eventually, quietly, disappeared from the other Web sites a day or two later.

The erroneous item never appeared on the Tradeshow Week Web site because we were not able to substantiate it through an on-the-record source.

Like every news organization, from time to time we will make a mistake — but it will never be because we were racing the clock. The Internet has indeed raised the stakes for everybody in the news business. There is always, eternally, the drive to be first with the story. We all want that.

But in pursuing that goal, Tradeshow Week will not compromise a value more significant than speed: accuracy in reporting.