Breaking news is not broken
In the wake of this past week’s events there is a lot of talk about how the media and the Internet deals with breaking news. There are a lot of people claiming that the Boston Marathon media coverage was the death rattle on a corpse long dead.
The fact is, breaking news is messy.
It has always been messy.
Take a moment and watch Walter Cronkite break the news of the JFK assissination http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K8Q3cqGs7I
The broadcast starts and Cronkite doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t know if Kennedy is alive or dead, how many shots, even what happened. The opening moments of the coverage involve a camera focussed on a hotel ballroom where Eddie Barker has to fill time with speculation and vague information.
At 1:43 on off camera voice reports a rumor, from another news source, that the president is dead from an unconfirmed, single source. Stop me when any of this sounds familiar.
For the next few minutes there continues to be rumors, a suspect taken into custody, no name. There is a lot of confusion.
The JFK assination resolves very quickly for breaking news, due to the fatal nature of his wounds.
Breaking news is inherently messy.Technology just amplifies this messiness.
Technology is an amplifier. It shines a light into the dark corners of everything and exposes things we don’t always like to see. This is not just a reality in breaking news, technology amplifies broken corporate processes, government inefficiency and everything else it is pointed at. In the past, the media was able to hide the messiness because there was time between the breaking news and press.
In Cronkite’s case, he didn’t have to fill 24 hours of news or compete with a remote control or new media sources. These technical limitations allowed for stylistic restraint.
I don’t think that the media is broken it’s just we are seeing what was always there. I think that the problem is that the news media, specifically cable news, is trying to compete with technology that is faster and more fluid. It is like a horse racing a F1 car. In this analogy, the horse isn’t broken, it just isn’t up to that specific challenge.
As technology amplifies the inherent messiness of breaking news we wax notstalgic for a simpler time.
Gourville’s rule of thumb states that, when switching between products, existing users underestimate the new technology by a factor of 3x while simultaneously overestimating the existing technology by 3x. This rule of thumb works in reverse with the early adopter doing the same.
This led Andy Grove to state that a new technology needs to be 10x better than what’s existing before significant switching occurs.
This seems to be what’s going in this current debate. In a brief Twitter exchange between myself, Matt Ingram of GigaOM and Ian Brown of the Globe and Mail,(here). Ian states some clear disdain for the messiness of the new media landscape. Matthew defends it.
Both camps are simultaniously overvaluing and undervaluing eachother.
Breaking news is messy and we just need to get okay with that.I don’t think that any technology can fundamentally change the inherent nature of breaking news.
