So how important is the dateline in a news story? You don’t have to look much further than the Washington Post to find out. They recently published a story about a Vienna man getting run over by a Verizon truck. 
I know when I first read the story, I was shocked that Verizon had a presence in Austria. I looked the article over for some clarification on exactly where this particular Vienna was located.
Scrolling down, I saw a link that offered more information on Vienna. Success! Surely this would solve the mystery!
The Mystery Solved? Not so fast.
So what do you see when you click that link? It is pretty fascinating, especially because it is different today than it was yesterday when I first started investigating this.
Vienna, Not Vienna
It turns out that the link is for the Austrian Vienna, but now the Washington Post article is in effect punking the website. It won’t take many more clicks until the Evri website shows that this event actually did happen in Austria, instead of the Virginia suburb I am inclined to believe is the actual location.
So what do we learn from this? The first lesson should be if you are writing about a location with an ambiguous name, you should clarify the location. In this case, how many people are there on the planet that would default to Virginia as the location of Vienna when they heard the name of the city? Not too many. For a local news outlet, this is less a problem, but for an internationally read and regarded newspaper, this is pretty serious. I don’t think high school journalism students would make the same mistake.
The second lesson is for Evri: Don’t trust computers to be in charge of your content. There needs to be a person there to sort these things out. Your site is listed in beta, so maybe there is time for you to figure out a cost effective way of stopping this sort of punking of your content.
It’s the 21st century, folks. Let’s learn to be global in our thinking and put a stop to senseless disinformation.
The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary - A dictionary of British slang, written by a Scotsman living in America