E-Mediat Tidbits: “It’s a perennial newsroom quandary: When a reporter has a hot story, should you break it online immediately or hold it for the press or airtime deadline?”

The anecdote related by an editor for the Nashua Telegraph suggests don’t hold the story:

“It is not TV or radio or other papers that are going to beat you — it is your readers. There are more of them, they know more than you, and they don’t have deadlines.”

I know that many of the people working in our newsrooms still can’t quite believe this could be true. And I can’t believe they can’t believe it (Can you belive it?). All those bloggers… all of those video-capable cell phones…

For the longest time there was this, “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forrest” mindset. If the bank was robbed at 3:00 p.m. but none of the news media had reported it… it was like it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t real until we told you about.

From now on, when the tree falls…somebody blogged it.