News You’re Prepared For: What the MSM Does Best

While the death of Walter Cronkite may have initiated a lot of chatter bemoaning the changes that have occurred in TV news coverage since his heyday, his death also provided a great platform for the main stream media to show off its strengths, as well as its ultimate weaknesses.

Unlike Michael Jackson‘s surprising death a few weeks earlier, Cronkite’s diminishing health had been common knowledge in media circles for quite some time, giving most major media outlets time to prepare a slick respectful homage to the journalism giant. When Katie Couric broke the news on CBS it was with a well edited reel of Cronkite’s greatest moments. There was also the flawless special that ran last night in lieu of 60 Minutes. Not to mention, the New York Times had two obituaries and a homepage slide show ready to go shortly after the news was announced.

Blogs, in this case, seemed less useful beyond acting as a conduit for the pre-packaged material. Round-ups of videos appeared (many courtesy of CBS’s YouTube channel); we did a collection, as well as a Twitter round-up. However, beyond that there seemed very little reason to immediately scramble anything together when the big boys had already done such a bang up job.

This of course in great contrast to Jackson’s death — and pretty much any other major breaking news story, for that matter, where bloggers, and now Twitterers, frequently comprise the front line of information, often with slapped together pieces that can generate huge traffic numbers simply by dint of making the story available. All the while the major news orgs hurry to play catch up.

Today happens to be another great example of the sort of prepared news the MSM does best: the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Try and find anything on the internet right now that can compete with the interactive slide shows and videos the NYT.com currently has running. Top notch, but also something they’ve clearly been working on for weeks. On that note, it’s not hard to imagine a time where the printed version of the newspaper is little more than an expanded version of the Week in Review: summaries, analyses, and recollections of news past, whether it be recent or distant.

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