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Comment by notauser | Hacker News Reader

How significant is a 45 minute delay to news that Tiger Woods was in a car crash?

Unless it's 30 minutes to the start of a tournament and betting hasn't closed yet the delay is insignificant.

One thing that is hard for most tech people to understand is that the line between news and entertainment is blurry. Why do you need to watch a sports event live? You don't, but you enjoy it.

There is very little news that most of us really need to know. However, many people enjoy learning about events that are potentially interesting to them as early as possible.

It's not so much that you enjoy the event live as you are annoyed when it is going on and you are not watching it. The same can't be said of news. You can't be annoyed by not knowing Tiger Woods was in an automobile accident. You can be annoyed, however, by reports that turn out to be false. I don't see of any downside in ESPN waiting 45 minutes so the report can be verified.

I think you are missing the point of the post. Tiger Woods getting into a car accident in a non-tournament day is for the most part "useless" breaking news. Some might argue that it's still useless even in a tournament day.

However, what if you received flooding information 45 minutes before it happens in your area. (I'm from the Philippines and we experienced heavy flooding recently and my house was nearly flooded b/c the "normal" news channels didn't know how bad it got before it got really bad). Of course, that's just one example.

Point is the power of Internet/twitter allows for breaking news that might be relevant to you and might give you enough time to avoid disaster, etc.

You're missing the point of the parent. If CNN breaks it on Twitter, they COULD break it on cable immediately. They've done it many times when real news occurred. They COULD break the flooding in your area (and probably would) as soon as they learned of it. I'm guessing the actual lead time, if it's something as important as a major flood, is a matter of at most a minute or two.

Which means that all Twitter in this case did is bombard people with stupidity 30 minutes before cable TV did the same. That's not a value add. If anything, it's an extra 30 minutes before this stupid fact pushes something useful out of my brain. Because I avoid Twitter, I knew who won the Battle of Trafalgar for an extra half hour before cable ruined that.

If you wanted to give an example of Twitter being useful, you'd give one where some normal person (not a cable news network) broke a story that got big before the MSM even found out.

That is my point. Someone else (a normal person) breaks a major flooding news in her area via Internet/twitter before CNN or other MSM. In our area at least, it would be at least 10 minutes or more before our MSM gets any news on this.

Another recent example, tied to the flooding, we had brownouts but the MSM was reporting incorrect brownout schedules. We went to twitter and got the tweets directly from the utility company. This example is not breaking news per se but it affects our daily lives.

Sorry if that wasn't clear before.

Right, but that sadly wasn't the point of the original post. Like most MG Seigler entries, it was logically incoherent and claimed that Twitter "wins" because CNN broke a story there before they broke it on their news. That's just dumb.

For CNN to break something on cable it has to be really important. There is a very serious filter there. It must be important.

Twitter requires no such filter. This allows much more breaking news through.

I don't think that news needs to be defined as 'important' against an objective standard. Of course "Tiger Wood hurts finger" isn't objectively time sensitive. If it is important to you, you could read about it in a monthly with no consequences. It appears & is read in dailies regardless.

It is news if it interests people. If it is news, speed is probably an issue. People like to be in the loop for (possibly) irrational reasons.

You are trying to make the time sensitivity of a news item objective by attaching actionability to it. Most news is not actionable. People want it fast regardless.

I don't think it is even controversial that "you heard it here first" is important to most news outlets.

If this is also representative of what the delay would be for a more major event (whatever one might consider one to be, with the added caveat that getting the knowledge quickly be very important), it's quite relevant, albeit in a more "this could be an issue in the future" sort of way.

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