If a story is viral, truth may be taking a beating

Truth has never been an essential ingredient of viral content on the Internet. But in the stepped-up competition for readers, digital news sites are increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction, and saying that it is all part of doing business in the rough-and-tumble world of online journalism.

Several recent stories rocketing around the web, picking up millions of views, turned out to be fake or embellished: a Twitter tale of a Thanksgiving feud on a plane, later described by the writer as a short story; a child's letter to Santa that detailed an Amazon.com link in crayon, but was actually written by a grown-up comedian in 2011; and an essay on poverty that prompted $60,000 in donations until it was revealed by its author to be impressionistic rather than strictly factual.

Their creators describe them essentially as online performance art, never intended to be taken as fact. But to the media outlets that published them, they represented the lightning-in-a-bottle brew of emotion and entertainment that attracts readers and brings in lucrative advertising dollars.

When the tales turned out to be phony, the modest hand-wringing that ensued was accompanied by an admission that viral trumps verified - and that little will be done about it as long as the clicks keep coming.

"You are seeing news organizations say, 'If it is happening on the Internet that's our beat,'" said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. "The next step of figuring out whether it happened in real life is up to someone else."

The difference seems to be that the news organizations that published the recent pieces - Gawker, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Mashable among them - do not see invented viral tales as being completely at odds with the serious news content they publish alongside them. The Huffington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, Gawker was among the first to report the cocaine use by Toronto's mayor, Rob Ford, and BuzzFeed is building teams of investigative and foreign correspondents.

Of course, websites like these are not the only news organizations to be seduced by stories that are too good to be true. In just the last month, CBS' venerable "60 Minutes" had to apologize for taking too credulously the claims of a security agent about the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Instead, editors at these sites acknowledge frankly that there are trade-offs in balancing authenticity with the need to act quickly in a hyperconnected age. "We are dealing with a volume of information that it is impossible to have the strict standards of accuracy that other institutions have," said John Cook, editor in chief of Gawker, which highlighted the essay on poverty, by a woman named Linda Tirado.

"The faster metabolism puts people who fact-check at a disadvantage," said Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, which reposted the fictional airplane tweets, the letter to Santa and the poverty essay. "If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you're the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it's proved false, you still got those views. That's a problem. The incentives are all wrong."

But Cook says he thinks that readers can tell which content is serious and which is taken from the Web without vetting. "We assume a certain level of sophistication and skepticism of our readers," he said.

It is unclear how much readers care whether a fascinating story is true or not, at least in terms of clicking on it. Melanie C. Green, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said that while people told her they cared deeply, their emotional responses remain the same either way. "It's the same as movies or books," she said. "We want to see something new, maybe escape our lives."

Most embellished stories have little real-world consequence, but not all. People donated $60,000 to Tirado, based on her vivid description of a life of poverty, until she closed off donations (Gawker also suggested people stop giving her money.)

In an email conversation last week, Tirado directed a reporter to seek her public assistance records and said that she thought people were "using this as an opportunity to avoid talking about the issues." She expressed no intention to return the money. Zach Poitras, a Brooklyn comedy writer who wrote the Santa letter two years ago, said he felt he had been unfairly labeled a hoaxer. "I am not into pranking people," he said.

He and friends began calling some of the websites that carried the Santa letter as soon as they saw it online.

"The real hoax," he said, is that some journalistic websites can be lazy. "No one called me," he said. "They waited for the facts to come to them to correct."