Bad info wastes time - official
Jinfo Blog

22nd June 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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It’s pretty obvious that bad information can lead to bad decisions – but a survey by Dow Jones and the Special Libraries Association spells out just how serious that risk can be. Around 40% of the respondents cited its impact on decision making, and 17% the risk of missed business opportunities – but by far the biggest impact of bad information seems to be the sheer amount of time it uses up. Interestingly, fewer than half the respondents were professional researchers; the majority were classic end-users – people who searched for and used information, although it wasn’t their primary job. And there was good news for information professionals; respondents felt that professional researchers were by far the least likely to fall prey to bad information, compared with business people, students and new or inexperienced researchers. For providers of paid content, the findings were less clear cut. Only 49% mentioned using paid information sources as a means of avoiding bad information, compared with 76% who said use only reliable sources and 73% who favoured verification through multiple sources (headline findings and comment at http://digbig.com/5bbtmb and further link to the full results at http://digbig.com/5bbtmc). The survey is the current star turn on Dow Jones Factiva’s Bad Info web site (http://www.badinfo.org/), a small but growing treasure trove chronicling the damage that such information can do. Its benefits to Dow Jones as a publisher of premium content are obvious – but there’s plenty of potential for information managers to turn these stories to their advantage as well. Dow Jones has become something of a standard bearer when it comes to exposing the undesirable effects of misinformation. In a report last year, Pay Now or Pay Later (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24127 for comment), it came up with all sorts of reasons why relying on free information could be a high risk strategy – citing, for example one scary story of how an accidental link to a six year old news report temporarily wiped 76% off the value of United Airlines’ parent’s shares (also reported by VIP at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e11215). Dow Jones’s agenda is, reasonably enough, the value of paid for value-added content over the free stuff – and it’s also rightly vigilant over the use made of its own material. Currently, for example, it’s suing the market analyst Briefing.com for allegedly misappropriating headlines and articles from its real time Newswires service, sometimes within minutes of their original publication (http://digbig.com/5bbtmd). There is an ongoing debate to be had about free use of information and, as part of paywall pioneer News Corporation, Dow Jones is in the thick of it. But quite apart from the issues of accuracy highlighted on the Bad Info web pages, that debate must also establish, unequivocally, when lines have been crossed.

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