The internet is instantaneous. We expect informed opinions yesterday and updates the day before for today's news. News outlets want to develop a reputation of being first to report something, which often means that they don't have time to validate (but they have endless airtime to tell you that you heard it hear first). This is why unconfirmed stories about celebrities deaths can go viral before the person has even read their morning paper (and who reads the paper instead of just setting up an RSS feed?).
For those not up on the latest breaking news: Pat Burns and Gordon Lightfoot are not dead. One day, they will be, yes, assuming our empirical observation that all previous living beings have died continues to hold true ...
So once again the traditional media outlets are up in arms about irresponsible people getting media-like access to athletes so that they can blog or tweet the latest gossip without it passing editorial muster (Dowbiggin, it's like you've never seen the NLL - the forums are chock full of relatives who break news long before the Insiders and their wiretaps and even further before the poor interns who actually contact the credentialed media). I don't disagree. I want news about my family and closest friends immediately, so I'm not willing to start the funeral pyres and effigies of smart phones just yet. But the more distant my relationship, the less I need to have instant updates. Yes, I love my sports teams and musicians, but really, I can wait until tomorrow morning when some diligent reporter has had time to digest the previous night's game, has gotten a few soundbites through pointed questions in the post game and spent all night toiling with his or her thoughts in time for the story to appear in the morning paper (or the morning backlog of my RSS feed). People usually need time to reflect in order to say something intelligent. We can say funny things, and accidentally insightful things in the heat of the moment, but the lasting thoughts usually come with sober reflection.
In fact, when it comes to sports, I actually wish the media would cut back on the post-game sound bites. Winning teams are either elated by the victory ("we played a great game, it was a fantastic feeling"), or have processed it enough to be able to say cautiously optimistic things ("we could improve on our defence/offence/transition; I've got to hand it to the other team they really pushed us all game long"). Losing teams have the opposite reactions but they come out as either emotional or mildly sober. You 'reporters' aren't providing any actual news or human interest, just sweaty guys standing in their locker stall wishing they were still playing the game and not having to deal with the media. I know these clips are necessary to make the 10pm/11pm and 6am-11am recap shows more than just a highlight reel, but it's the same crap cliches all the time.
So when I hear that a reporter is treated poorly in the locker room, I'm only mildly outraged that it was a case of stupid testy boys and attractive sideshow girls. It makes me think that maybe the locker rooms should be media free. Give the players time to get debriefed by the coach, shower and change and then get your sound bites. But since that's not going to happen, maybe we can have some sober second thoughts on how we evaluate men and women for their jobs, and maybe we can move away from the sort of instantaneous analysis and judgment we seem to crave. Afterall, sometimes our first thoughts are best left unsaid, no matter how instinctively right they seem to us at the time.
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