Here’s an awful story about a Colorado newspaper that, in the race to be the first on a story, stationed a reporter at the funeral of a three-year-old girl and had him post details of the event live on the Internet:
In what some are saying is the result of the newspaper’s undying desire to be the first to report on local news, it Twittered the live events at the funeral instead of waiting to report on it after it was over. The decision to Twitter the funeral was called into question by most in the Colorado press and elsewhere who claimed it wasn’t the right place, nor the right time to use a real-time social tool to discuss the events of the service . . . .The reporter, Berny Morson, still has his Twitter feed active and the live events of the funeral are still included in his timeline. His coverage of the funeral begins with a description of the casket and mourners filing in and ends when “family members shovel earth into [the] grave.”
Last week, it wasn’t through a phone call but through Facebook that I learned that two of my high school friends had died in a car accident. The horrible news was announced almost immediately on the popular social-networking website, sandwiched between two other people declaring that their weekend hadn’t lived up to their expectations.
