Beware pitfalls of amateur video: The Toledo Blade’s managing editor apologizes for mistakes in reporting a fatal police-involved shooting based on a flawed Facebook video.

“The first of several mistakes we made in covering this breaking story was to share on our website a Facebook Live feed of a young man recording the gathering crowd in North Toledo and what people were saying. The man repeated over and over that police had shot ‘a young boy,’ a ’16-year-old boy,’ telling his Facebook audience that ‘someone said’ the boy was kneeling in the street when ‘the police’ shot him.

“None of that was true,” wrote the editor. The video photographer was not a trained journalist “and in our haste to ‘get something up’ we grabbed his Facebook video and shared it.” It was removed when police explained they shot a 25-year-old armed robbery suspect.

Another mistake was an inflammatory headline, later changed, saying “Police gun down man in North Toledo.”