The Michael Jackson 'Internet Crash' And Modern News

The unfortunate and untimely passing of Michael Jackson this week underlined the trends in how news is gathered and distributed nowadays more than anything in recent memory. Indeed, the fact that the Jackson story "crashed the Internet" - more truthfully, slowed traffic on news sites to a crawl and caused Twitter to temporarily disable some features - was almost as big in the mainstream media as the singer himself.

What this means to you is this: If you are considering a career in any form of news and weren't thinking electronic before, this drives home that it's a necessity.

When people learned that the musical icon had passed on, the place that they turned was not, as in the past, television - it was the Internet and social media. People wanted their news immeditely, and they wanted to pick and choose which angles of the story they wanted to know about - something that online content delivery specializes in and does better than any other medium.

This is a huge and significant cultural shift. Think of every major news story over the last couple of decades, and what you remember is the television images, because that's how we all experienced them. In this case, what people are going to remember from the Jackson memorials are pages of text and streaming video of news reports.

Granted, this is nothing new, as media has been headed in this direction for some time - the presidential election and the Iran protests were also covered extensively online. But this was the first truly huge, mainstream acknowldgement that online newsgathering is now the norm, not a side supplement to a telecast.

Twitter had a huge role to play in this story, too, and if you're planning on a career in media, it's a skill you'd do well to master. Even if you're not planning to use it to report on every detail of your life, it is increasingly valuable to news organizations, both as a way to take infomrmation from sources and a way to distribute it.

The Iran demonstrations were called "Twitter's coming-out party" by the mainstream media, because it was the first time Tweets were taken seriously. This story did the same for online news in general. The news is fully online now, and it's there to stay.

- Bonnie