What Nt 2 Do

Back in April, Brian posted some tips for job seekers on the how to get employers' attention with your follow-up thank yous after an interview. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article about the new phenomenon of texting your thanks after an interview. The article, cleverly entitled "Thanks for the IView. I Wud 'Heart' to Work 4 U!" also chronicles how some interviewees are seeking out potential interviewers on social networking sites and trying to make "friends" prior to meeting.

I feel like the underlying message in some articles like this (although this one doesn't convey it overly much) is that the texting/Twittering/Facebooking masses are "the way things are" and anyone who gives the New Media Revolution any push-back is old and dated.

And while the means of the message are debatable - I, like Brian, still prefer a handwritten note that shows some thought and consideration - the message is not up for debate. Candidates genuinely interested in a job opportunity should say so in a manner and via a medium that indicates their professionalism. A misspelled ill-conceived text sent on the fly does not say "detail-oriented." I still stand by the notion that how you deliver your message has as much meaning as the message itself. While I'm growing to respect e-mail messages, too, I think it'll be a long time before "Thx 4 ur time" impresses me much.

Breaking (or Broken?) News Cycle

A few weeks ago, photos of a lost Amazon tribe were splashed all over the Internet. For the better part of a day, Yahoo! ran this anthropological discovery as the lead story in its featured news box on the homepage. The photographs, taken from a helicopter, were released as evidence in the case against logging on the Brazilian-Peruvian border.

But today, Yahoo! has been forced into a mea culpa retraction. Turns out the photos are of a tribe that's been "discovered" since 1910, and the photos were released as a political statement against logging. The photographer came clean on his real motivations in Sunday's edition of The Guardian.

Since the Internet has set the pace of the news cycle to warp speed, one wonders how much of the time the information is half true, mostly true or - worst of all - not true at all. In this case, the tribe was documented (if never photographed), but knee-jerk journalism sent the photos out on the wire before there was even time to confirm their veracity. The race to be first isn't always winning the slow-and-steady path to accuracy.

Maybe it's time to concede that Mama was right - you can't believe everything you hear. Or maybe it's just that you have to take one source with a grain of salt. With blogs - like The Inbox - taking to reporting at the grassroots level, perhaps the news cycle is just starting with the major news sources and is making its arc through the online forums. All the same, it's hard to find anywhere these days that give you just the facts. That's what sparked the Obama campaign to create its own "fact checker."

The bottom line is, whether it's the Amazon or the American President, it's sometimes advisable to be your own fact checker and make sure that seeing is believing.