Blogs
Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news
Muhammad Saleem over at Mu Life — a great new blogger I’ve recently discovered who focuses on social media — posted something about how Digg and Netscape had the news that Donald Rumsfeld had resigned long before Google News (long in this case being 20 minutes). His post was noticed and linked to by Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion and by Jeremiah Owyang, among others.
As I pointed out to Muhammad and Steve, however, it looks to me like Comedy Central actually broke the news a full 35 minutes before either Digg or Netscape got to it. If anything could reinforce how disrupted the journalism business has become, it’s the fact that a comedy channel can break news — which may not be all that surprising, considering that surveys show many younger people get their news from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
Of course, as Matt Sparkes notes on his blog, Digg and Netscape didn’t “break” the Rumsfeld news — they were simply the first to link to the Associated Press story. That’s not really the same thing. So it’s not really fair for Muhammad to title his post “Why Socially Driven News Is Better.” Faster, maybe — but not necessarily better.
That doesn’t mean Digg and Netscape and similar tools aren’t still a threat to newspapers, mind you, since in many cases newspapers just print the Associated Press stories too. And that is becoming harder and harder to justify.
license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
subscribe
grazr
TwitterCount
busted tees
Discussion
Comments for “Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news”
Add New Comment
Viewing 4 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Oh, and all Google has to do is post an AP feed and it wins this race? Hmmm. Me not get.
And as to Comedy Central, I agree it's a fun fact, but surely this is a fluke, yes? Someone happened to hear? So they "broke" it because they have a blog on which they can publish it? That's not really anything to hang a hat on, IMO. And even then, it looks like the info didn't come from Comedy Central staffers, but rather came from someone they brought in from the outside for a day - a "token conservative" - to help them blog the election, who had his own sources, and happened to hear this the very time he happened to be blogging at CC's Indecider blog.
Again, fun for sure, but not sure it means anything vis-a-vis CC vs. old news media. It probably just reminds us that anyone can report, and anyone can publish.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Just wanted to let you know I linked to your blog in my column on CBSNews.com today. Thanks!
If you want to take a look, here's the link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/13/blogo...
Thanks,
Melissa
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks