Glen Greenwald writes about the evolution/devolution of political reporting, and along the way makes some good points about the intersection between quick and important news. His main point is that the obsession with "first" and "hot" drives behavior changes that devalue "substantive." As he notes:
What Harris self-righteously and condescendingly denied in our exchange last year is exactly what he admitted to yesterday -- namely, that the establishment political journalists who dominate our news narrative (and those who run The Politico) fixate on meaningless, ephemeral trivialities in lieu of substantive reporting. Anyone paying even minimal attention to the coverage of the presidential race already knows this full well. And it was, after all, Harris (along with his co-author, Time's Mark Halperin) who admitted that "Drudge rules their world." But it's still notable that Harris now acknowledges that what he calls "important stores" regularly "disappear with barely a whisper," while "trivial stories" (of the type The Politico and most establishment political journalism specialize in) "dominate the campaign narrative for days."
On the face of it, this is quite plausible, and jibes with my experiences. If a reporter or editor is measured on traffic to a web site, then they will chase that traffic -- in the same way that local TV news does today, and has for a while -- which is a good reason *not* to pursue this particular strategy, unless you are a fan of local TV news coverage today. And often chasing traffic involves quick twitch reporting -- get out there first, get out there fast, cover lightly, follow up as needed. Simple and accurate at the expense of important and true. Which is fine for some sorts of reporting, but does, in fact, tend to degrade and devalue the importance of the longer term reporting needed to cover complicated stories and events. Slow twitch reporting is the stuff that sustains over time. Sometimes it results in breaking news, often it does not.
There is an urge to try and make this debate a battle where web journalism and blogs play the role of quick twitch and the MSM reprises their role as defenders of slow twitch, but I don't think it will play out that way. We are certainly in a news world today where the scoop is alive and well, and being first with the news is of critical importance (see my most recent post about reluctance to cite other sources on the part of the media as another proof point). So it's not about web v. print, or new v. old -- it's speed v. substance that is at stake.
Of course, the third player in all this is us -- the readers and watchers of news. If we value equally the slow and the quick, the trendy and the important, and demonstrate this via our watching/linking/reading behavior, then the scales balance a bit.