German newspapers report the death of Michael Jackson on June 26, 2009 in Berlin, Germany.
Really? A week after Jackson's death, he's still one of the top trending topics on Twitter. Four of his albums are still in the top music downloads on Amazon.com and two singles in the top iTunes downloads. And that's among the technologically savvy. A study by Pew suggests that 64% of the public think the media gave too much coverage to Jackson's death, but since Pew also found that 87% of the public believes the media pays too much attention to celebrities generally, this figure is surprisingly low. People magazine is so confident that Jackson will be of sustaining interest to America that it is releasing a book on July 10.
What the story of Jackson's demise might have actually proved is that each type of media —new, social, mainstream — has a part in the news ecosystem and one does not replace the other. The new media provides the speed, the social media provides the emotion, the mainstream media provides the heft. And Goldblum, well, he brings the weird.