I Am Facebook Friends With Ryan Lanza ⇥ salon.com

Matt Bors for Salon on the consequences of the rush to be first:

“Social Media” didn’t get anything wrong or right. Reporters got things wrong – people who made choices about what to post and how to headline it – and they looked like fools for doing so.

Out of respect to those who lost their lives, their family, and those in the community, I have hesitated to post anything about the horrific shooting in Connecticut. If you’re looking for gun law-related links, both Gruber and Kottke have a collection of good ones.

However, I feel that one of the nasty side-effects of the tragedy was that cable news channels plastered a photo of a man onto millions of televisions without verifying it. Turns out the guy that they posted is both innocent, and whose brother was the shooter. He now has to cope with the emotions that come from both of those aspects because Fox, CNN, Gawker, and others were in a rush to be first.