Here at findingDulcinea, we have a lot on our plate: news analysis, how-to guides, sassy features and one sweet new search engine. But among our offerings, there is one common flavor: the quest for accuracy, as the bookish etymology of our domain name suggests.
In 2007, we ran a news story entitled “Connectivity and Productivity: The Web Giveth, the Web Taketh Away.” The gist of the piece was about the link between access to information and proclivities to procrastination, yet the same phrase could be applied to the search for online veracity.
The rise of new media has given ground to fresh news voices and the five-minute news cycle. Inherent in the drive to publish constantly new content, however, is a tendency to fall out of the habit of fact checking.
Both The New York Times and The Huffington Post have been called out this week for featuring a blog and a video, respectively, as serious content, while in actuality they were spoofs. Retractions have been issued and the employee at the Baltimore NBC affiliate behind the doctored video has been fired.
Instances like these stress the importance of finding credible Web sites—and using findingDulcinea or SweetSearch, two Web sites that do this for you.
Anne Szustek
Senior Writer
Read our Beyond the Headlines story on this topic, "New-Media Blunders Stress Need for Fact-Checking."
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