Life comes at you fast

This is me in a state of bliss. No, seriously. I love my job.

You know what insanity is? Realizing that in 5 days, you'll officially be two years out of college, in your dream job, living on the beach. Honestly, it's the best kind of insanity there is out there and every day I sit back and thank God for the blessing of being where I am in life.

I know I talk about how thankful I am for the opportunities I have, how grateful I am for a chance to learn every day at my job, to not be stuck behind a desk 8 hours of the day, but sometimes I really have to let it truly sink in that I have the best job on the planet for me.

However, like I've said in that past, there are some definite downsides to this and one of those downsides came up in the struggle of covering the Boston Marathon bombings.

Breaking news is a big deal in so many ways to people who watch the news but even more so for those that "make" the news. The world we live in is so different than it ever was and I'm still waiting for television news to figure out it's place with the scope of what viewers expect changing so much.

The other day I had a gchat conversation with a friend of mine who said he didn't understand why reporters from CNN didn't get any closer to where police were. Earlier last week, I had another friend comment on how slow television stations were at reporting the facts and how he get most of his information from blogs and Reddit on the tragic situation. Then another friend made her own statements about how the news is potentially putting our police officers in danger for reporting things they're hearing over the scanners and whatnot.

Okay.

First, reporting things heard over the scanners is just a huge no. There's that. There's no if's, and's, or but's about that. Period.

Now that that's out the way, I feel like it's important for my industry to take a step back and look at everything that happened wrong in our coverage. I've learned that as much as I want to be first on a story, it's 1 MILLION TIMES more important to be accurate…but how do we reconcile that in a time when many of our viewers think they're entitled to information?

Well…I have one opinion to the whole thing. Viewers are entitled to one thing and one thing only: facts. As a reporter my job isn't to speculate, it's not to make assumptions about anything, but to investigate and get to the bottom of the issue. There's a reason reporters prefer to get emotional sound bites from people versus facts: we can say the facts, I'm not here to represent my subject's feelings, plain and simple.

You can't compare television news to a blog because, generally speaking, most people spouting things off on the Internet aren't triple checking their sources for accuracy. We aren't one in the same, so - to all my friends asking us to stoop to that level - well, you see how that ends up. To my other friend that suggested we get closer, well…after being told by police for lesser stories to back up from a scene or move further away from a location - for my own safety - I will just say: no.

My job isn't to change my standards for reporting to satisfy the viewer. My job is to get facts from multiple sources...or better yet, get the source saying it on camera to attribute what's being said, that way it doesn't blow up in my face should it be wrong.

If CNN had been right with their exclusive report, everyone would know and everyone would probably move on from it, but because they were wrong, it won't go away so easily; people may not remember who reported it first, but they will remember who reported it wrong.