You Heard It Here First

As an exercise in one of my introductory journalism courses in college, the professor asked each one of us students to recall how we had heard about some of the decade’s biggest breaking news stories – September 11th, the death of Princess Diana, Saddam Hussein’s capture, the space shuttle Columbia crash, the Columbine school shootings, and so on. Needless to say, all our answers varied depending on where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing.

But one trend emerged as evidence of our society’s breaking news consumption: more often than not, breaking news is broken by non-traditional news sources. Mobile communication technologies has made this more the case now than ever before via pda’s, laptops, cell phones, radio, and the like. These mediums utilize delivery mechanisms which ensure the message is both immediately accessible and always available.

Yet by doing so, these sources act more as discovery mechanisms than delivery; serving as a gateway to more traditional news media coverage. Like a tip-off or an arrow, they direct interested individuals to the news websites, cable news stations, and radio news networks that serve society with 24/7 comprehensive news content and coverage.

Such was exactly the case last Monday. Where did I first learn of the Virginia Tech tragedy? Of all places, ESPN.com. Aimlessly browsing the internet as one is prone to do on a Monday morning, my appetite for the weekend’s sports scores led me straight to the must-read story. My surprise came as much from the source as from the story.

“There’s breaking news coming out of every US news network right now about what could end up being the worst school shooting in US history…it’s even plastered all over ESPN.com,” wrote one individual on toolpower.net.

At first visit, the news was a mere “breaking news alert”; a one-sentence summary of what was known at the time. By later visits, an abc.com news story was linked and eventually the story was given center-piece treatment.

Of course it was center-piece news, it was the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. But why on ESPN.com, the world-wide leader in sports? Though the expected sports-angles were later explored, on Monday morning the Virginia Tech tragedy had as much to do with sports as it did with food, fads and fashion combined.

And yet, I would be willing to bet whoever the world-wide leaders are in food, fads, and fashion all reported the incident too. If they didn’t, they certainly should have.

Major breaking news -- the kind of rare event that you know it when you see it -- transcends niche publications; even a niche as large and powerful as sports. A website with hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each day like ESPN has an obligation to its readers to at least acknowledge its occurrence, if not further its coverage. To do anything less would be a disservice to the worldly awareness all news tries to promote.

ESPN.com has a history of such service to serious stories. Blogcritics, an online magazine, noted ESPN.com’s role in September 11th coverage. “That's odd, I thought. ESPN doesn't normally run non-sports news on their front page.”

Major breaking news is just that, odd and not normal. Further, it is the exception to niches because major breaking news is universal -- universally interesting and universally important. To ignore it and assume readers, viewers, or listeners have gotten or will get it elsewhere is to fail to understand one of the most basic roles of journalism: agenda-setting.
Major breaking news – local, national, or international – is a priori, regardless of one’s target audience. Put simply, it trumps the context of all other content.

Besides, you never know when it might fulfill that inherent journalistic instinct we all seem to strive for: the ability to say ‘You heard it here first.’ For someone, somewhere, they probably did.