Network News Flies Away with the Balloon

Much of North America became engrossed with the image of a Jiffy Pop container flying haphazardly through the Colorado skies on Thursday afternoon.  On this particular subject, I have little to say.  It made for incredibly compelling television for about a half-hour while the public thought that there was a little boy trapped inside this runaway balloon.

What I would comment on, however, was how the internet got involved.  It was an interesting case study in content distribution and collaborative reporting.  As soon as the story broke, the internet exploded with commentary on it.  Virtually everyone had some comment to add to the story, and they were doing it via Twitter, via Facebook, via e-mail, and probably dozens of other outlets.  The Balloon Boy story became an "Internet Tradition" in mere moments.  Websites were made almost before the story came to its conclusion.  T-shirts were made.  The entire country became the punditry, and then, shortly, we all became comics.  It was an excellent example of how the news will never be the same again.  We will not take our news from Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper.  In fact, we will openly mock them when they attempt to do anything other than give us the facts.  We'll let our friends and family and those whom we have invested trust in to inform our opinions.  We will always need journalists, because the facts and realities need to be ascertained and collected into a format that makes them easy to digest, but the species of "journalist" and "pundit" that we have today is not long for this world, and their extinction can't come soon enough.