The new speed of breaking news
Cory Bergman October 11th, 2006
I’m sitting at my desk at work here in Seattle when my MSN Instant Messenger pops up an alert, “WNBC reports small plane crashes into NYC building.” Almost simultaneously, my Blackberry begins to receive breaking news alerts. A couple minutes later, one of my co-workers receives a text message from his daughter in high school, “Dad, is it a terrorist attack?” Five minutes later, the Dow and NASDAQ take a sharp drop. Amazing. The web and mobile devices have become the first responders, and breaking news alerts have suddenly become critically important. Imagine, for example, if MSN had omitted the word “small” in the alert. You can picture the collective gasps from the thousands of people who would think 9/11 had returned. While TV can omit details here and there and recover quickly, breaking news alerts have a semi-permanent nature to them. They trigger a flurry of text messages, IMs, emails and phone calls which spread amazingly fast, even to kids sitting in class at school. Welcome to the new speed of breaking news.
7 Comments Add your own
1. Jim | October 11th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
I was watching CNN during the afternoon on Wednesday. They put up a lower third in red reading “Plane crashes into…..”
They changed it later on to read “Small plane……”
And anchor Kyra Phillips said something about “it might have been a helicopter.”
She also uttered the word “um” about a thousand times. She does not excel at breaking news. She’s an adequate reader of prompter, and also of barking about her sister-in-law while in the ladies’ room.
2. Echy | October 12th, 2006 at 5:07 am
It’s good to see that the kids IM’ing and text messaging rather than listening to their teachers.
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echy,
that’s only because their teacher was out having sex with one of the students.
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