Honest question, why is breaking news important? How exactly does knowing unsubstantiated details about an event immediately male one’s life better?

This is what I always wonder. Any time I see a news story (even on MSM) marked as "BREAKING" or "EXCLUSIVE", I'm like... who cares? That just means you either a) rushed to publish without making sure you got your details right, or b) you paid someone to not shop their story around to other outlets (which is gross).

My life would not have been impacted in the least knowing about the Trump assassination attempt a few hours later (or even the next day), rather than minutes after it happened.

The MSM has enough problems these days with journalistic integrity and practices. I don't think the teeming mobs on Twitter are an improvement, though.

It isn't important. The vast majority of "journalism" is as worthless as the vast majority of "discourse" around it. If it doesn't affect you personally, you can likely safely ignore it and if it does affect you personally, you probably won't need the news to tell you about it.

"Breaking news" used to be relevant in that it was news that "broke into" existing programming. It didn't necessarily make people's lives better but at least it tended to cover matters of high national interest like Presidential assassinations or disasters or wars. But now that everything is breaking news all the time everywhere, the term no longer means anything other than being a synonym for "current news," which isn't even really impressive anymore.

Unless it's regarding immediate local emergency that you might need to respond to, breaking news has zero value besides a brain tickle and something to talk about.

If you feel you have any kind of mood or attention challenges, as many now do, you might want to double check if it's something you should be optimizing for.

Hard agree. Nearly nothing outside your real personal life is so important it can't be learnt about tomorrow, or next week.

There are exceptions; if you have a flight booked that day and didn't learn about the Crowdstrike thing till you got there, that'll be a problem, but it would've been a problem regardless of your immediate knowledge of it.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

Cripes.

How is your life improved by getting that news minute by minute instead of an hour, or even a day, later?

It’s an excellent question, but I do think you can get valuable insights from seeing how a major political event unfolds in real time, as long as it’s something you’re interested in. It can help you to view the subsequent news bulletins with a critical eye and interest and it can give you a richer depth of understanding than you would otherwise get.

If it’s an event that you’re not particularly interested in, then there’s not much value in getting details in advance.

Another thing, it’s not just hours. Sometimes it’s months (or in rare cases years) before a recurring topic on social media finally makes it to the news, because it’s controversial/narrative-defying, so it takes them a long time to work out how to talk about it. I don’t want to mention specific examples because it would be distracting, but there are a few topics I see mentioned daily/weekly on the news today that were pretty much absent a few years ago, yet were heavily discussed on Twitter at the time, and I am very glad I was aware of them.

or indeed, not at all? :)

There is a marked difference between "Breaking new developments" and misinformation being spread to juice engagement.

Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed. It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.

> Nobody should pretend that Twitter is a place where accurate information travels at light speed.

I agree, but I think a lot of people who use it view it that way.

> It is in desperate need of moderation and being run by a man with clear monetary incentive to mislead the public.

I don't think you wrote that the way you meant to.

At what cost? You would need to monitor your spyware all day to gain any value. I'd rather save the time and read the news more efficiently.

In today's world information overload is a bigger problem than lack of information. It follows that unactionable information is useless.

What is actionable about knowing about the assassination attempt 1-2 hours before others? Did you act differently based on this information? Did you benefit from this sufficiently to weigh up for the time spent on Twitter 20 times a day at the off-chance of catching a breaking newsstory before MSM would?