Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve noticed that there appears to be about a 3-day lag between when a newsworthy (but not front-page newsworthy) event happens, and when the MSM reports it.
My wife is not a daily reader of my blog; for the most part, she’s apolitical (or, as she puts it, I’m “political enough for both of usâ€). But oftentimes she’ll ask what I’m writing about while were sitting at home (yes, I often blog in my pajamas, sitting in my recliner, while watching television). I’ll give her a quick run-down about the stupid or unbelievably stupid Left Wing Lunatic quote or action of the day.
And then—about three days later—while I’m writing about something else, the story I told my wife about three days earlier is getting air time on CNN. She’ll quip, “Didn’t you write about this a few days ago?â€
Yep.
This isn’t isolated to once-in-awhile, or even every-so-often. It happens almost daily.
I understand the reasons for this lag: the MSM has a bevy of filters through which it has to run a story before they can slap their name on it and then serve it to their audience.
Bloggers, on the other hand, are often first-hand witnesses to the news and stories they are reporting: we see it happen; we take a picture or two, maybe a video; we head home, sit down, and type out our story; 30 minutes after the event happened, our story is published.
And when we’re not first-hand witnesses, we can use tools like Technorati to find sources that were there.
Often, my first indication that the MSM has finally reported on a topic that I covered several days past is that I’ll notice a spike in traffic from people googling for names or information associated with that story. And since Google and the other search engines indexed my page a few days ago, my site (and other first-to-act Bloggers) is one of the first returned results—almost always ahead of the MSM’s (who “broke†the story) own Web site.
