I think I may have previously mentioned that one of the local daily papers has started allowing people to submit stories to be posted on its webpage. I recently encountered a situation which that emphasizes the need to monitor and control your message and image on the web.

Last week I noticed a strange headline on a reader submitted news story for a local university theatre. The headline was poorly written and the word choice wasn’t the sort of thing you would use to promote an event. Even a mundane “Theatre performs X In October” would have been more suitable. Upon reading the whole piece, I figured perhaps the department was having the students write press releases to get experience. Then I realized the show it was spending most of the space discussing had opened and closed already.

I contacted a colleague in the department to discover what had happened. If the story was submitted late, that was one thing. However, since this was the same newspaper that had inexplicably omitted our events from a recent review of Fall Arts Events, I was concerned that maybe their approval process for web stories had a backlog that was delaying their release. If that was the case, I wanted to take that into account when submitting releases. Regardless of what the answer was, the delayed story damaged the organization’s credibility a little.

It turned out that a journalism student decided to be helpful and submitted a story unbeknownst to anyone at the theatre. (Though the student waited until her journalism professor reviewed and graded it. I hope the professor wasn’t aware this outdated story was being posted.) This news caused me some concern. Because there was no verification procedure in effect, someone who had no connection with the theatre was able to represent themselves as if they did and had a story published under the imprimatur of a major newspaper.

Certainly it isn’t news that the internet allows people to misrepresent themselves. About three years ago, Drew McManus bought up a number of alternative web addresses for orchestras around the country. It takes a lot less effort to submit a fallacious story to a newspaper than it does to create a spoof site that looks like that of the Asian Art Museum. This event represents a new variation on the problem because newspapers are still generally seen as a dependable source of information (at least in the non-political arena). People may not yet be distinguishing between the links to reported stories and those to submitted stories.