2) The Mainstream Media Can No Longer Be in the Breaking News Business
Although the popular TMZ site was the first outlet to report Jackson's death, at 2:20 pm, news of his demise did not really become widely known or believed until MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times and CNN confirmed it an hour later and it arrived in the e-mail inboxes of people who don't follow the news as obsessively as Twitterites and journalists. People who'd read it on TMZ were eager to click on over or tune in to find a more familiar, and trustworthy, news organization's version of the story. Dover also reports that Google News did not mention Jackson's death until 20 minutes after MSNBC. (The volume of searches the site received tripped safety mechanisms and made the search engine think it was under attack from a spambot.) So much for new media.
Meanwhile, over at TMZ, Michael Jackson posts are still coming thick and fast, many of them with little news value and some flat out wrong ("We're told the trust provides for Michael's children and mother, and distributes money to several charities." Wrong), successfully removing any traces of credibilty the site might have won for its initial reporting. And the mainstream media manages to scare up some scoops of its own, like CNN's video of Jackson rehearsing three days before he died.