Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough

With this weekend's news being dominated by the death of pop singer Michael Jackson, it's also worth taking a time to reflect what his death says about the priorities of the news media and the speed at which information travels on the worldwide web.

Now for the news
While the death of Michael Jackson has dominated the airwaves since Friday morning (Australian time), the story first broke on the Internet on the Hollywood gossip web site TMZ.

“We are totally wired in this town,” Harvey Levin, the site’s editor in chief, said in a telephone interview Friday.

The Jackson news was easily the biggest scoop in TMZ’s nearly four-year history. Kurt Andersen, a journalist and cultural critic, said the story was highly indicative of the evolving editorial practices that media outlets are grappling with.

Among many journalists, “there’s still this residual but not yet vestigial instinct to think ‘Oh, it’s just TMZ, let’s wait for The Associated Press or The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times before we can say it’s true,” he said, adding: “I don’t think in, say, five years, that will be the case.”

Which adds to 'verification before publication', the extra burden of doing so in shorted time frames.

Now, being unable to break the news, the traditional media takes the fall back position of endless follow up with nanny, the ex-wife, the doctor, the bereaved fans - all of which shoves other genuine news items far, far down the running order.

Is it too late to do a moonwalk back to a time when entertainers were merely reported on the entertainment page?