There are a lot of reasons newspapers are dying, but surely a major factor must be the pace of the news. I was reminded of that fact by this excerpt from SI.com football columnist Peter King's latest MMQB column:
Tucker rides shotgun and fires up Twitter, profootballtalk.com and whatever other news ports he has on his BlackBerry. For a former player, he's a real sports junkie. He tells me someone's reporting that Mike Vick just worked out for the Patriots at 3 o'clock this afternoon in Foxboro. Immediately, I get a remember-where-you-heard-the-Vick-news-first text from Sal Paolantonio, who told the crowd at the Dr. Z benefit back in May that he thought the Patriots would be a major player for Vick. I'd been saying the Patriots were my best-guess landing spot for Vick too.
Five minutes pass. My phone rings, and it's Someone Who Knows, telling me absolutely, unequivocally the Patriots did not work out Vick, and there is no interest in signing him, and Bill Belichick likes Kevin O'Connell as Tom Brady's backup, and the team doesn't need the circus that Vick would engender.
It's a weird media world we're in right now. My allegiance, obviously, is to SI.com, but I know if I take 10 minutes right now to dictate the item to someone on the news desk, the story will get up in 20 minutes, and we'll probably be too late. So I decide to throw a couple of Tweets up, the first at 4:59 saying Vick wasn't in Foxboro, and the second that the Pats don't want Vick and like O'Connell. Sure enough, at 5:01 p.m., Adam Schefter Tweeted that Vick wasn't in New England either. It's a crazy media world. Forgive me, Time Warner.
If the news cycle (at least on some issues) is now so fast that King doesn't have time to get a story up on a news website, it's no wonder brick and mortar printed newspapers can't keep up.