Here’s a NYTimes.com piece that every editor should (no, must) read: Delaying News in the Era of the Internet. It’s about how when NBC newsman Tim Russert died, the network decided to hold onto the news for a short while until his family could be alerted to the bad news. The other major networks agreed to do the same.
Of course, we live in an era in which big news holds for no network, and news crept out the door at NBC and was spread all over the Internet well before NBC acknowledged that Russert had a heart attack and died in its offices. The New York Times article, by Noam Cohen, focused mostly on how Russert’s Wikipedia page was updated with news of his death before the official network announcement.
One thing that Cohen underplayed was Twitter, the popular microblogging service, which I believe makes holding on to news pretty much an untenable act from here on out.
Here’s the deal with Twitter as it applies to fast-breaking news: All it takes is one person with knowledge of a big-deal news event (in this case, anyone in the NBC building who learned about Russert’s death) to instantly blast it out via Twitter to blow apart any notion you may have of holding back the tide for a few minutes.
You can easily imagine what happened when the first Twitter post about Russert’s death was published. That person’s Twitter followers repeated it to their followers, and viral effect took off. Others may have spotted it via Twitter aggregators like Summize.com.
It’s News 1.0 thinking to believe that you can still squelch a big story when it’s so easy — and so inevitable — for someone with knowledge of an event to start blabbing about it.
I don’t mean to fault NBC executives’ noble desire to hold the news until Russert’s family learned the news through proper channels. It’s the humane thing to do. I would not wish it upon anyone to learn that a loved one has died through the media. It’s an unfortunate “inconvenient truth” that you can’t hold back news anymore.
So should NBC News have acknowledged this reality and blasted out a headline before even notifying the Russert family? There are sound ethical reasons for holding on to news like that and making those phone calls to family members. Bravo to NBC News for taking the ethical high road.
But NBC executives were being naive if they thought that the news wouldn’t get out until they decided to post the news.
