Sometimes it’s just funny what happens when checking facts is a mere luxury. You may use this story as a good example for staying suspicious when it comes to secondary research based on open sources. And this is how it goes:

Last weekend the German Minster for Economic Affairs stepped down, and a new one was appointed. Since the successor is young and rather unknown, many newspapers and their websites tried to report as much information on him as possible. One strange detail is the absurd number of his given names - aristocrats sometimes seem to be undecisive on that… Anyway: his name is “Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jakob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg”.

An author of one of the most important German watchblogs, bildblog.de,  invented an additional given name and inserted “Wilhelm” into the German version of Wikipedia.

And now the crazy part comes: top news media in Germany reproduced the invented name, including the most important online news site Spiegel Online, the Website of Handelsblatt (being the most important financial newspaper), the website of the second most important TV newsshow in Germany (heute.de), and many others. The most important yellow press newspaper Bild even printed the wrong name on the front page.

Okay - maybe that wrong name is a minor detail. (Another detail was mistaking another company for the company of new Minister… ) But it reveals the mechanisms of a turbo-charged news machine that trades speed against accuracy.

What does that mean for your secondary research efforts? What does that mean for decisions based upon open source intelligence? In my experience this story represents only the tip of the iceberg.

Watching the career of this news item in the last 24 hours, you will find three reasons to distrust major media (at least here in Germany, and maybe in other countries, too):

Reason 1: The most important newspapers and online news sites use Wikipedia for background information. Many of them just copy and paste news bits.

Reason 2: Not many of even the most reputable media seem to check facts.

Reason 3: Many media do not even correct faults on their websites (which should be the easiest part). And I suspect many of these faults find their way into the archives and have the chance to influence future decisions.

As competitive intelligence experts, we have to evaluate market moves, competitors’ decisions, political statements. We better take into account that the working conditions in the media industry change for the worse in terms of quality, and that the number of sources with identical content is not in every case an indicator for accuracy. Checking facts is obviously something hard working journalists even at the most important news media just cannot afford any more.