Don't think blogs can break news? Witness the developing story around the attempts to shut down Scrabulous, the fabulously popular Facebook version of Scrabble.
Mainstream media is all over this story right now, one of those classic tales of big business going after Web entrepreneurs (OK, Web entrepreneurs who seem to have stolen the big business's intellectual capital). Toymakers Mattel and Hasbro, who own the international and U.S. rights to Scrabble, respectively, want the proprietors of Scrabulous to shut down, citing trademark and copyright infringement.
It's a terrific story, with nothing but readers (as we used to say), not the least of whom are the highly literate millions of devoted Scrabulous players. But what took traditional media so long to come across this great story? It was all over the blogosphere last week, and Mattel and Hasbro's actions against Scrabulous actually began two weeks ago. The Scrabulous community has been buzzing about it in all sorts of venues online—where was the press?
This is just the latest of several stories that have emerged from the blogosphere, YouTube and elsewhere lately yet taken days or weeks to surface in mainstream media. You'd think that traditional journalists would learn to keep an eye on leading blogs in technology and other industries, and pay attention to the chatter on sites like Facebook. Otherwise they risk being way behind on stories like this one. Like everything else, the news cycle is moving far faster these days. Traditional media just has to learn to keep up—or risk looking even further behind the curve.
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