I have a history with News24, so here's a some comments on the Bill Gates story published over the weekend.

Firstly I have no insights on what happened behind the scenes. https://twitter.com/CowansView/status/1247497755330842625

Although it is no excuse, on weekends online news organisations work with a fraction of the staff compared to weekdays.

It is no surprise a problematic story was published on a Saturday night. There simply is less eyes to check & correct.

Journalists are human and make mistakes.

What differentiates reputable news organisations from your local Facebook group is that when a stuff-ups happen, they try to fix it.

They apologise and publish a correction.

News24 did all this.

I hope that News24 don't only look at how the story got published. That's the easiest thing to rectify.

The larger problem is how did the story stay up on the site for almost 24 hours?

The story was tweeted out again a 2nd time on Sunday morning and was the lead story on News24 website twelve hours after being published on Saturday night.

Many comments pointed out the problem with the story on Sunday morning --- hours and hours before it was removed.

Even if there was a skeleton staff on duty (which I assume was the case on the weekend), I would expect that most staff members would keep an eye on the news during the day from home.

People working in the news usually are news junkies.

Dozens of people working at News24, http://24.com , Netwerk24, City Press etc would've seen the story.

How did not one see the problem and raise the alarm on Saturday night or Sunday during the day? Reading Trevor Noah's tweets would've been a clue.

The incorrect story became such a problem because it was given time to simmer for such a long time.

If News24 can resolve the structural issue of leaving a problematic story unchallenged for 24 hrs, then when future mistakes are made, it will hopefully not be such a big deal.