Can’t hardly wait
I know a guy at WSJ.com (the online part of the Wall Street Journal). He is keenly aware of many absurd stats, like by how many milliseconds the WSJ had posted an article ahead of its competitors.
I just laugh at this mentality, because most readers (and even focused readers like myself) have no interest in these games, nor would we notice who broke a story.
What I want is good coverage, not the first coverage. And, actually, it’s hard for breaking coverage to be very good since it’s focused on its firstness instead of its completeness. No editor will admit that quality is sacrificed in a rush, but it’s an obvious outcome.
Now, in an insane attempt to make life seem even more frenetic, the WSJ has started putting many more Breaking News bulletins on its front page that contain little more than a headline and a promise of more to come.
Though they might say the intent is to “break news,” and give readers an early edge (at what?), the purpose of these alerts is to let you know the WSJ was there first (although, if they are hearing it, doubtless 20 traders somewhere have been talking about it for three hours already).
What we get, dear readers, is the sacrifice of depth for haste. I’d blame Murdoch, but there’s far too much of this going on. Somehow the world functioned just fine before instantaneous news dissemination.
One could argue that this information will make a difference. To whom? To traders, so they can further churn our markets? To businessmen in related industries whose decisions are not going to be split second? The front page of every major paper now has a war-room mentality.
In the real world, I think complete information is better than early snippets of information. Unless we really are dealing with a momentous piece of news (such as an attack or a stock market crash), the more time journalists have to digest and report, the more useful the story becomes to those who read it. (Certainly, the Altria Philip Morris spinoff does not fall into the urgent news category!)
Immediate news is often just noise. Anything substantial can wait a few hours.
Print This Post
30. January 2008 at :
I argue the instantaneous breaking of news snippets is driven by a group that is near and dear to your heart: hedge funds. The sooner news becomes evident, they gain “first mover” advantage. Or at least, they think they do.
I support my argument by the correlated rise of low-latency technologies. There are firms out there whose entire brand promise centers around being X amount of nano-seconds faster than their competitors. To accomplish this speed, the have bigger cables, put infrastructure closer to the exchanges (exhibit A: 55 Broad Street) and streamline the interface between the front office and back.
Hedge funds and other buy side traders thus spend enormous amounts of money to streamline their news flow, and to find ways to turn those bits of news into mathematical formulae which can instantaneously trip a trade of an affected equity, debt or derivative instrument. They believe that by being first to the market, an advantage is gained.