Editor's Note: Dudes, We Dropped the Ball

To those of you who followed the false Daniel Johnston rumors earlier this afternoon, and especially to those to wrote in to us or left comments:

The rumors stemmed from a confusing timestamp glitch in a past news article, which generated a considerable amount of buzz on Facebook, which, in turn, caused a reader to write in to us about it. We confirmed the situation with City Hall, but only later realized that they had referenced the same outdated article!

Needless to say, yikes.

Had this been a less pressing matter, we would have waited for absolute confirmation from the folks directly involved, but since the situation originally presented itself with a serious degree of urgency, we felt it was in our readers' best interest to know exactly what we did in real-time. It is generally against Austinist's standard policy to post wild rumors and speculation—music festival lineups notwithstanding.

The post has since been updated, with its original contents removed. Please know that we greatly value our credibility and always strive to report only what's been corroborated by trusted sources. I'm sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

All the very best,

Allen Y Chen
Editor, Austinist.com

Photo by Tim Davis