Buying Breaking News

David Carr has written a great piece in the NYTimes today about how TMZ has emerged as a news breaking factor in the news ecosystem. I think the most interesting point in the piece is that while ESPN needs the NFL for what he calls relevancy and profit, outfits like TMZ operate on their own set of rules. They pay a lot of money for content and don't have to worry about ruining relationships with sources/partners.

I also recommend checking out Jeff John Robert's piece in Gigaom about public interest litigation in a digital environment. He talks about how newspapers were at the forefront of access-to-information and public interest litigation in the last century but are limited to do this with small legal budgets these days. He also explains how tech giants such as Google and Twitter have emerged and replaced newspapers as the direct source for news. These companies also have vast amounts of data that a traditional newspaper would legally try to unseal. Roberts explains that this creates a whole new set of legal fights for tech giants in the digital era.