CNN News Story Could Have Been Written by a Fourteen-Year-Old
Last week a headline came across my CNN RSS feed talking about the identity of the woman at the center of the Eliot Spitzer controversy. “Interesting,” I thought to myself. “Maybe I’ll take a minute to read what CNN has discovered.”
To my surprise, the CNN article had no first-hand quotes from the woman, Ms. Dupre, or even any actual news. The article begins by pulling one quote from a recent New York Times interview. The writer then did some amazing, high-level journalistic research and found Ms. Dupre’s MySpace page.
The writer did more than just mention the page however. Instead of interviewing Ms. Dupre or anyone who knew her to get some background, this writer spent all of 10 minutes browsing her MySpace page, copied and pasted it into an article, and called it a day.
Here are some of my favorite lines from this article:
“She revealed little else in the interview, but her MySpace page offered some insight into her background.”
“In her profile, Dupre says she moved to Manhattan to pursue her music career. “I am all about my music, and my music is all about me,” she writes on her MySpace page. “It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel.”
“It (her MySpace page) also features a song titled “What we want” recorded by Dupre, with lyrics including “I know what you want, you got what I want, I know what you need, can you handle me?”
Wow. I can’t believe that song isn’t a hit yet. In all, Ms. Dupre’s MySpace page is referenced in 11 of the 24 paragraphs.
If all it takes to get your articles on CNN.com is the ability to stalk someone on MySpace, then there’s a nation of 14-year-old out there just waiting to get published.