The Passing of an Era

The whole saga of the Kim family was an amazing mixture of joy, sorrow and heroism.

But quite apart from all that we experienced in their ordeal, was the way in which we experienced it.

I kept looking at the news sites on line, and I was continually seeking news of them on television, but there was no coverage, even hours after news was released elsewhere. Their story was just not as urgent to the news channels as Iraq.

Where I found up-to-the-minute news was at the Kim’s website, and at odd places like Digg.com and Engadget.com.

And the news was immediate. I knew what was happening as it was happening, just as if there were paid professional news teams on the spot. This was because people were using a guestbook as an forum to post what was happening as it happened.

But even when the story did break on the feeds, the news sites later remarked at the traffic they were getting online, over and above their main news stories.

“At 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, less than 90 minutes after James Kim’s body was found in rural Oregon, the story had received 1 million page views on MSNBC.com, making it their top-rated story. The Iraq report was No. 12 there. On CNN.com, Kim’s story had received 755,000 page views by mid-afternoon, nearly double that for the Iraq story.”

“Over the past two days, traffic at NBC11’s Web site, NBC11.com, has experienced a 92 percent increase in page views over the average day, and an 88 percent increase in unique visitors, “driven almost entirely by the Kim story,” said NBC11’s vice president of creative services and programming, Jim Monroe.” (sfgate.com)

This one news story will mark the passing of an Era of the power and significance of major news bureaus, in my opinion.

What this means is that we not only have access to the news we want, but that we now have the means to find that news quite apart from the traditional news sources. Yes, we have had that privlege for a while on the Internet, but this is the story that caused the rest of us to use it.

It is something new in the world when a guestbook website gets a lot more hits than the giant news services, and it marks a turning point in the grand scheme of things, because our world just got a whole lot smaller and more immediate than ever before. And it makes you wonder just how relevant those news giants and networks are going to be in the future.

Regards,
Roger Born
“Always drink upstream from the herd”

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