Did you know that Nissan has developed a new kind of paint that can change colors on command? It was news to Nissan, too.
Nissan’s come up with some pretty impressive things over the years, but color-changing paint isn’t one of them. But if you’re a loyal reader of Wired, Gizmodo, Engadget, Jalopnik, Mobile Magazine, or Daily Tech, you’d have your source to believe they did invent the next generation “paramagnetic” paint.
And so far, only readers of Gizmodo and Engadget are treated to a correction.
Every publication, no matter how careful, makes mistakes. It’s part of the business. Traditionally, newspapers like to bury them a few pages in, placing corrections in a bottom corner somewhere.
But at least they’re there. This incident, though, is more of a case of piggybacking gone awry. Not that piggybacking isn’t standard fare in the news industry. It is, and it happens with the best of publications. Compare these two articles, for instance.
See, happens all the time.
Credit for unraveling the Nissan paint mystery goes to Darius at YoungGoGetter.com, who painstakingly traced the “news” back to its origin after receiving comment from Nissan that they’d only heard of the new technology.
Sure enough, it was one misinterpreted and slightly altered sentence at NextEnergyNews that started it all:
This revolutionary new paramagnetic paint is a technical wonder and is viewed by Nissan and other auto companies as an amazing innovation that would draw huge traffic to dealerships and will make it easier for consumers to get the exact option level they want on a car without the sacrifice of their favorite color.
Which, by the time it reached Wired, became:
Nissan Developing Color-Changing Auto Paint
With similar so-far uncorrected variations at Daily Tech and MobileMag.com.
But what’s most humorous about Darius’s investigative blogging is the publications’ use of the same image of a Nissan car with only the colors altered. Your choice: black, white and red; black and red; silver and black; or green and black.
More time was spent fiddling with the image than actually researching the blog posts, it appears.
So what’s the moral to this humorous tale? Darius nails it:
Bloggers and readers should do more to research the facts and original sources before jumping to the publish button. How else will we establish blogging as a credible, journalistic endeavor?
Yes, indeed. The salty, veteran journalists out there are laughing their butts off.
