The Real Cost of our Need for Speed

0lyn • 22nd Jul 2010 • Media, newspapers

Sometimes you never know where a story is going to take you, and this is one of those stories.  At the beginning of the week I decided that I was going to comment on the recent NYT article – In a World of News, Burnout Starts Younger by Jeremy Peters.  This ran in the Media & Advertising section.  My focus was on the change in the media world that had gone from the 24 hour news cycle down to the hour by hour cycle that is being fed by online and cable news networks.

My point of view was how the change in the media / cycle was driving change by those who gather and distribute (started to say print) our news.  Staff was now living on the edge, getting up early and working late to capture the very latest scoop in order to feed the hungry news beast.  And then everything changed, again.

Shirley Sherrod, happened and the world grew indignant at the initial clip shown on cable and then network news.  The villagers of cable news called for her head…and low and behold they got it, immediately via a stop the car and dictate your resignation on a road in rural Georgia.  The problem then came later in the same 24 hour, old news cycle, that the story was wrong, the full clip was entirely different and a big mistake had been made.

Apologies have ensued, heads will roll (in the future), and pleasant phone calls were exchanged by the parties involved.  Now we have our senior government leaders blaming the new news cycle for forcing them to ‘jump the gun’ for their actions.

What I was trying to say at the beginning of the week is that we are living in a different media world where immediacy tends to trump ‘getting it right.’  It’s great to get my news on my new Droid X (shameless plug) with blazing speed anytime I need it, but I do miss the old get it right mentality of the 24 hour news cycle.

This is happening with all of our communications today, including all of our emails, blackberry.  Errors did happen on the old cycle, and I was usually handling those calls.  The difference now is that when we hit send – it is sent, and the whole world now has that news – you better hope you got it right – or get ready to field those nasty calls some of which could be coming from a gloating newspaper reporter, who however slowly is also looking for your head for your mistake.