It has been a very interesting year so far for news junkies. Since I seem to suffer from that particular addiction, I’ve recently become more aware of how the sources I look to for news have evolved over the last few years. And how the news I get these days is much more social than it used to be.
In the midst of all the monumental world news that has been going on in the last few months and weeks, a couple of days ago it was announced that after much speculation that Katie Couric was indeed leaving her ground-breaking anchor position for the CBS Evening News after a five year stint. What amazed me the most about this announcement was not that she was leaving, but that in the five years she held the job I didn’t watch her newscast even once. That’s no reflection on Katie or CBS News: I haven’t watched any network newscast for probably at least a decade. I couldn’t begin to tell you who even anchors the nightly newscasts on ABC or NBC (and in case you are wondering too, they are anchored respectively by Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams …I confess I had to look them up). Now for a self-confessed news junkie who used to religiously watch the nightly news back during the days of Walter Cronkite and Huntley/Brinkley (yes, I’m old. I know), not knowing who anchors the network newscasts these days was a sobering reminder of how news reporting (and and my consumption of it) has changed over the last few years. Like many other people I suspect, I stopped watching the news (both national and local) when I realized that the majority of “news” being reported was more accurately “olds”…the headlines and stories reported were about events that I had read about on the internet hours or days ago. (I won’t even get into a rant about my frustration with the transition to non-news items like “opinion news”—and in our next segment, what does the average person on the street think of this? We’ll find out after the break—or what I like to call “what if news”—Japan is reeling after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. What would the impact be on South Florida if that happened here? Granted, faux news is present in abundance on the internet as well, but I don’t have to waste a lot of time reading it. (Ok, maybe a short rant.))
Pretty much the same is true for newspapers. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper for years, and only occasionally even pick one up to read it (and I literally mean pick one up, not buy…like if I’m stuck in a waiting room somewhere and don’t have decent reception on my iPhone). But an event happened this week that pointed out that many people still want to buy newspapers. As souvenirs. With the announcement of his death on Sunday evening May 1st, the death of Osama bin Laden generated a noticeable spike in newspaper sales on Monday May 2nd. It also, of course, generated a huge spike in traffic on social news sites like Twitter and Reddit. Twitter announced (via Tweet, of course) that from 10:45pm to 2:20am Eastern Time, there was an average of 3,000 tweets per second…”the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever.” Around 11:45pm, when President Obama concluded his announcement of the event, the rates peaked out at just over 5,000 Tweets per second.
It seems that I’m not alone in my flight from “traditional” news outlets to more social news outlets. Facebook, for instance, keeps me up-to-date with news about the people I care most about, while Twitter and Reddit alert me to breaking news stories almost instantly. If I want in-depth news about something, the internet can provide me with far more in-depth coverage than any television newscast or newspaper. And it’s always on…
And while we’re on the subject of breaking news I’d like to offer a bit of advice to television news producers: lose the flashing “breaking news” headlines. By the time I see it on television it’s most likely neither breaking nor news.
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