No News Is Good News?

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…)