Get Your News a Week Late

The phone lights up before you are out of bed.

Breaking. A freight train has come off the rails outside a city a few hundred miles away. Tankers involved. Residents told to stay indoors.

You read it in the kitchen while the coffee brews.

By eight there are three versions. Twelve injured. Forty injured. A witness says he heard an explosion before the crash. An expert on a news channel explains what the tankers were carrying and how far the fumes could spread.

By lunch you have checked it six times. You meant to stop checking the news an hour ago. The number of injured has come down. The explosion has become a sound one man heard. The expert was wrong about the tankers.

By evening the story is about the rail company's safety record, and three people you know have opinions on it. So do you.

Five days later it gets one paragraph in a weekly round-up. Two people were treated at the scene and sent home. The cause was a cracked rail. Nothing exploded.

You gave that story an hour of your day, in ten-minute pieces, and most of what you took in was wrong. It also left a low hum of alarm under everything else you did.

Read the news once a week and that story reaches you as a single paragraph, with the mistakes already taken out.

The first version of a story is the one with the most mistakes in it. It is also the one that stays with you.

FIRST REPORTS WERE WRONG LONG BEFORE PHONES

On the afternoon of 15 April 1912, the Evening Sun in New York ran a banner across its front page.

"All Saved From Titanic After Collision."

Other papers had the liner under tow to Halifax. Anyone who bought those editions went home believing everyone on board had been rescued.

The ship had gone down more than twelve hours earlier. More than fifteen hundred people were dead. That evening the White Star Line's office in New York admitted it.

The reporters were not lying. They had fragments of wireless messages, a shipping company insisting its liner could not sink, and a deadline. They filled the gaps with the story that sounded most likely, and printed it.

That is how first reports are made, and why breaking news is so often wrong.

The Version That Held Up

One short email a week for men who would rather understand a story than follow it hour by hour. Blunt, practical, and still true at the end of the week.

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THE FIRST REPORT IS A GUESS WITH A DEADLINE.

Sometimes it is no guess at all.

On the night of 15 February 1898, the American battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbour. Two hundred and sixty men died in the explosion or soon after. Nobody knew why.

Two days later, the New York Journal printed the answer anyway. "Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy." Beneath it sat a drawing of the ship with a cross marking where the mine had supposedly been fired, and a description of the wires said to have set it off. The paper offered $50,000 for the culprits. Spain had been found guilty before the inquiry had even opened.

Within ten weeks the two countries were at war. A Navy study in 1976 pointed to a fire in a coal bunker beside the ammunition store. The cause is still argued over. The first version won anyway.