Justin Ling, a former Vice editor and now a contract reporter assigned to the McArthur beat for The Globe And Mail, believes online speculation can be both beneficial and dangerous to journalists. He has been in contact with the online community
Websleuths on previous stories and found the site’s users kept the speculation to a minimum and focused primarily on digging for information.
“Obviously, the more people you have on a story, the more [information] you’re going to get,” he says. “You have literally dozens of people poking around, searching through Facebook and missing persons reports, coming up with ideas and theories that a team of two or three journalists might not be able to do by themselves.”