Racing against to clock to update news

By on June 25th, 2009 In Social Media

As you may have heard –at least from the volume of tweets — Michael Jackson has apparently died. But even before I the BBC or CNN confirmed (BBC carried another ironic story), I checked his Wikipedia entry and there was no update. However, in the discussion pages, an editor had posted the news, and you could see them anguishing if it was OK to cite a news organization that was quoting TMZ.

So who exactly do we depend on for breaking news? I deliberately use the word ‘depend’ here because I could be very well wrong about the first line in this post –since even HuffPost is citing TMZ, and the re-tweeting goes on non-stop.

But my cynical bone about dependable news sources is tempered with a lot of ‘news’ leaking out of Iran despite clampdowns on mainstream media. Citizen journalists have moved from the fringes into the center to bring us the news. Speaking of which, take a look at this chart of what they are up against.

Comments

Linda VandeVrede Says:
June 25th, 2009 at 5:57 pm

I remember watching CNN during 9/11 – now I turn to twitter and Facebook for updates. Twitter is faster than television, although not always accurate – e.g. the story today about Jeff Goldblum’s death.

Marketing Sociologist Says:
June 26th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

Ironically, Wikipedia had Farrah Fawcett’s death before TMZ!

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