BREAKING: The Sun Has Not Exploded

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Monika Bauerlein,
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The next few months are make-or-break for Mother Jones’ fundraising. We need to raise $300,000 quickly, and we need more online readers to pitch in than have been. Please learn more in "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," where we go into the brutal economics of journalism, and what makes Mother Jones unique and worth supporting if you can right now.

When publishing breaking news, all good editors should exercise a sense of urgency, while also preventing any cause for unnecessary alarm. This is particularly crucial when reporting news that the world is about to come to a sudden, apocalyptic end.

Just ask the Athens Banner-Herald, which on Monday fell “victim to miscue” after an emergency broadcast system notice mistakenly alerted readers that the sun had just exploded:

Erroneous news of the sun’s explosion gave way to one of the best breaking news retractions we’ve seen in awhile: “To our knowledge, the sun has not exploded,” the paper’s director of digital wrote in a post.