With my professor hat on I have become even more attuned to how the media (of which I am part) reacts to things.
Last night at 8:13pm I texted a friend (also in the media) to tip him about the Sydney story which I had seen on twitter. I followed the story on twitter for a while, then found that CBS News online had a stream of Sky News which was streaming a local Aussie station.
Meanwhile I channel surfed. Nothing.
CNN got a little interested for a while…then at 9pm they chose to air a show about dinosaurs. MSNBC had on something about Pot Barons and Fox stayed in commercial long enough that I no longer cared what they might or might not have aired (it’s possible they did all-star coverage for 12 straight hours once that break ended, I don’t know).
My friend tipped me off that Reddit of all things had a cool page up through which I could track the story. It had 20,000+ viewers (is that what we call them) last night and still 10,000 plus this morning.
Breaking news has a habit of breaking when it’s not convenient. It doesn’t like to happen between 9 and 5. It waits until the boss is unreachable, the main anchor is 2.5 hours away in the Hamptons, or 3 in the morning.
So on a Sunday night, the news channels aired shows about dinosaurs and pot.
The reason this bothers me is because when I was brought up in the industry I was taught about dependability and reliability. If you call yourself a news station I kind of expect there to be news on when there is news. On this Sunday night, nobody could be bothered. Dinosaurs. The news channel version of John’s Law of Cable Networks (every channel eventually realizes they should not bother and just show X-Files reruns.)
This morning this is BIG BREAKING NEWS STORY.
Why?
Because we’re all at work now and have to fill the airwaves all day. There isn’t a dinosaur show scheduled. We have morning shows and midday shows and talking head shows and by-golly we’re gonna fill that air-time. Now it’s a BIG STORY with a big BREAKING NEWS logo.
It was last night at 9pm too guys.
…
Update 10:41am Looks like the story is resolving. Just wanted to point out that this post was from 7:26 this morning.