An Earthquake for News

Yesterday's East Coast earthquake was a perfect example of how the order of news has changed for breaking news stories.  We've all been aware of this change for years, but yesterday you could actually see it play out over a period of just a few minutes.

Sequence of the order of news in yesterday's tremor:

1. News happens - in this case, our buildings wobble.
2. Twitter, social media and email light up - there's a massive instant discussion about what happened.
3. News organizations try to catch up and explain what people are already talking about.

This is the reality of news today.  Items two and three in the order of news have changed places.

The old order of news put reporting ahead of discussion - like this:

1. News happens.
2. Reporters cover the story and put it in the newspaper the next day.
3. People read the paper and discuss the stories in work breaks and at dinner.  They make calls and write letters about the stories they read in the newspaper.

Another interesting aspect of yesterday's news coverage was the early appearance of old news.

People felt the tremor, tweeted and then searched, for example "earthquake Massachusetts".  Since in the few seconds since the quake no reporter had written anything longer than a tweet, search engines, which were fairly instant in finding new stories, also had some old stories high in the search returns.

What does this all mean for news?  It means that the discussion generates the news in big news stories, and it means any journalist who isn't watching the discussion of the beats he's covering will be left behind when news breaks.