Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009 was one of those “shake your head” kinds of days. I was halfway through a health care story for the Canadian newscast Global National, when a colleague walked by my desk and mentioned there was a six-year-old boy alone in a runaway hot air balloon. Having my own almost-six-year-old at home, I was horrified. He must be so afraid, so cold, I thought.
Of course he was neither because Falcon Heene, who quickly became known as “balloon boy,” was never in the balloon as it streaked across three counties before landing near the Denver airport.
From anotherbeautifulday.wordpress.com
It was a riveting story though: a missing boy, anxious parents, live satellite video of the balloon. Of course we dropped health care and started working on it. Before long, we heard the Heene’s were on the TV program Wife Swap. That led to YouTube where there was a goldmine of Heene family video. Let me digress to mention that after watching it I said to the guys, “there’s something fishy about all this.”
Sure enough, the pressure was too much and Falcon Heene couldn’t help but “spill” the story. Remember the interview where he threw up when asked why he hid in the garage?
As often happens in breaking news, media outlets feed off one another, confirming new details they hear from others in addition to developing their own leads. I’ve always watched the majors – CNN, Reuters, Associated Press. I have to say I’ve never thought of looking to Wikipedia for breaking news coverage.
Maybe next time I will. Our class discussion of the 2005 London Underground bombings showed there are Wikipedia people who take it upon themselves to write about major events. We learned that story’s page was created about 20 minutes after the bombings and edited 40 times in the first hour.
The Balloon Boy page was created about two hours after the story first broke. The page history shows it was edited 59 times in two hours and 35 minutes, before the 60th entry updated that Falcon Heene was found unharmed in the garage attic.
What began as Colorado 2009 Balloon Incident is now called Balloon Boy Hoax and has been updated more than 500 times. So I would agree with Garrett Graff’s statement that pages like this one are an example of systematic journalism – where someone who has never heard of this story could read the page and learn everything about it.
Do I agree that Wikipedia is a credible breaking news source? I guess that depends if I believe the mainstream media are credible news sources. On the Balloon Boy story, Wikipedia editors did not appear to be making their own calls to gather first-hand information, but rather were pulling together pieces of information from a variety of news sources like CNN, the Globe and Mail, The Daily Telegraph and others.
I would call Wikipedia more of an aggregator in this instance. In my mind that’s a positive for the reader as it provides a more complete view of the story, drawing from numerous sources rather than relying on one.
As the Balloon Boy story played itself out – from horror to worry to skepticism and cynicism – Wikipedia was tracking it all, building sentence by sentence what would become a detailed entry worthy of an encyclopedia.
