Tweetgeist: ProPublica shares secret sauce; Radar's faulty Roberts rumor

Today we will provide no links to information about the iPad's April 3 on-sale date and no links to stories about Twitter's ten-billion-tweet milestone. Instead:

"Recipe" for an investigation: ProPublica drops gumshoe kimono

Investigative reporters have always been highly competitive. So ProPublica's decision to publish a highly detailed "How we did it" explanation of the approaches and techniques reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber used in their long investigation of California's nursing oversight board is an extraordinary and forward-looking act -- and was greeted as such.

@mthomps This @ProPublica post on their reporting techniques is blowing my mind - http://bit.ly/bHYLVS. EVERY SERIOUS NEWS STORY SHOULD HAVE THIS.

@chanders It's amazing that a practice common for hundreds of years - transparency of method- should feel so impt. http://bit.ly/ayHDFk Yet it does.

ProPublica's editors explained their thinking:

We believe that healthy competition among proud journalists brings more news to light. But in this era of shrinking resources, there is clearly a role for new forms of collaboration....We hope that others will use the techniques created by Ornstein and Weber to hold local officials accountable. Reporters who look into the local boards that oversee nurses or other health professionals will make new discoveries, some of which will undoubtedly go beyond what we have found. That, in turn, will help others push the story ahead. We hope statehouse reporters, beat reporters, general assignment reporters, bloggers, citizen journalists and others will use this road map.

ProPublica's Amanda Michel tweeted a reminder that the entire "recipe" was published under Creative Commons license so the information could be easily republished.

Faulty Radar falls for Roberts gag

A bogus rumor that US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was about to resign spread online yesterday, sparked by a report in Radar Online that was then picked up by the Drudge Report.

The apparent source of the rumor was a Georgetown law professor's prank. intended to illustrate a point about the credibility and reliability of informants. He also provided a lesson in the gullibility of (some) journalists.

@zittrain Be careful what you say in class...

More links of note

• The Long Island Press chronicles "How Cablevision is Destroying Newsday."

• Columbia Journalism Review's Ryan Chittum details the Wall Street Journal's over-hyping of a story about hedge funds colluding to drive down the euro.

• Alan Mutter describes Rupert Murdoch's launch of a New York metro section for the Wall Street Journal as a salvo in what will be the last great newspaper war (between the Journal and the New York Times). He also suggests that Murdoch's obsession ill serves his stockholders.

• NYTPicker offers a detailed critique of the New York Times' coverage of Gov. David Paterson's intervention in an aide's domestic abuse case.

Links for laughs

The Onion: How will the end of print journalism affect old loons who hoard newspapers?

• From Discover: The Science News Cycle