When the Dal­las Cow­boys released Ter­rell Owens in early March 2009, Face­book and Twit­ter updates were abuzz with indig­na­tion, cel­e­bra­tion, and indif­fer­ence. Despite the dif­fer­ences among those reac­tions, one thing could be agreed on: by the time the news­pa­per printed a story the next morn­ing, T.O.’s release was no longer break­ing news.

To com­pound mat­ters, his release was a devel­op­ing story full of off-the-record sources reveal­ing infor­ma­tion well before the release was made pub­lic and offi­cial the next day. Web sites were updated with sup­ple­men­tal news as quickly as it came in, mean­ing the local news­pa­per wasn’t only scooped by ESPN.com, a national news outlet—it was print­ing day-old infor­ma­tion. (more…)

Late last year, Rupert Mur­doch, News Corp.‘s chair­man and chief exec­u­tive, said “Good jour­nal­ism is an expen­sive com­mod­ity.” It’s well-known that any­one get­ting into jour­nal­ism doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily do so for the money. It ain’t good.

Still, I dis­agree with Mur­doch in that the future of news requires read­ers to pay for it. Maybe for spe­cialty pub­li­ca­tions, but not for the every­day news—especially online. Why are news pro­duc­ers still hav­ing trou­ble with this? (more…)