By now, if you haven’t heard the story of the Balloon Boy, well, you must live in a bubble (I know, sorry). Frankly, I could care less whether poor little Falcon Heene was hiding in the attic or actually trapped high above Ft. Collins, Colorado in the belly of his Dad’s jiffy pop creation. Nor do I care if the whole thing was a hoax. What does interest me is how a story like this can evolve, or shall we say, balloon, in the media.
Know your sources?
The nature of news media, and how a story transitions from non-traditional to mainstream media outlets has been of interest to me for some time. In my opinion, we all want to should know where our news comes from and how trustworthy the source. Most will remember Jason Blair’s handiwork at the New York Times, but in many cases we are not dealing with fabricated sources, rather niche or foreign. In my case, I used to work at a program at Georgetown University Medical Center dedicated to tracking global internet news media, looking for signs of socially disruptive events suspected to be caused by biological agents, like influenza. The approach at Georgetown was analogous to the United States National Weather Service storm warning models (such as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale) to detect and assess threatening weather conditions.
Of course, the concept of using internet news media for detecting and tracking disease is not unique, with excellent examples to include Healthmap and Google Flu Trends. Moreover, there are folks who attempted to leverage news media reports for trading on Wall Street. Take my favorite example from years past, Monitor 110. Once heralded as a “Bloomberg killer”, Monitor 110 was based on a thesis that,
…more and better information is being put out on the Internet every day, information that can be valuable to Institutional investors who are constantly looking for an edge. And these investors were not very sophisticated about how to best access this information; Monitor110 would use technology to help them get that edge.
