St Paul, MN-based Internet Broadcasting Services, which operates the websites of several NBC affiliates, has fired the employee who posted news of the death of Tim Russert on the Wikipedia website before it was officially announced, the New York Times reported today (Monday). The newspaper quoted a spokeswoman for IBS as saying that the employee had thought that the death was already a matter of public record. The Times further reported that 11 minutes after the Wikipedia website reported Russert's death, another IBS employee updated the site again to make it appear that Russert was still alive. The report touched off angry condemnation by several online news sites. Henry Blodget, publisher of Silicon Valley Insider, wrote: "It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did." John Biggs, editor of the tech site Crunch Gear, wrote: "NBC, of all organizations, should know what to do with news. They have been a trusted source for decades. For them to fumble in this way ... is an egregious chain of failure that led to what can only be described as a debacle. Fine, can the kid because he updated Wikipedia on the job. That's fair. But don't try to cover your tracks ham-handedly."
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