911: Overall

Many of us did a very nice job with structure, but we struggled with the use of allegedly and proper attribution.

Until someone is convicted in court, any criminal or lawsuit-related actions are alleged. We need to liberally use alleged when referring to actions that are illegal, and we need to cite from where we are getting that allegation.

For example, if we write, Omar killed a squirrel, for libel purposes we take responsibility for claiming I killed a squirrel. We are saying it definitely happened and we can prove it.

It doesn't help that much if we say, Omar allegedly killed a squirrel, because if that's all we wrote, from a libel standpoint we are making the claim ourselves, without further evidence.

We need to attribute the allegation, not just for libel purposes but also so the audience sees from whom we're getting that from, and how we know that. The correct way would be, Omar allegedly killed a squirrel, police said.

Also, in this exercise it wasn't enough to say the dispatcher said or the girl said. That's because we didn't speak with them; we only know what they said because of the 911 call transcript.

If we just said, the girl said, we leave the impression with the reader that is what the girl told us. That's not correct, though. We only know because that's what she said in the transcript. So, proper attribution would be, the girl said, according to the 911 call transcript.

And yes, we need to be consistent in attributing like that, because the reader doesn't know if we used a mix of transcript-related quotes and our own interviews in putting together the story. Proper attribution makes that clear.