Breaking News
Over the past 19 hours, I’ve gotten four Breaking News alerts from CNN:
- Colorado judge sentences ‘balloon boy’ dad to 90 days in jail with some of that time to be served on work release.
- Man holding hostages at Virginia post office is in custody, CNN affiliate WDBJ reports.
- David Goldman has been reunited with his son, Sean, according to the U.S. consulate general in Rio de Janiero.
- The U.S. Senate has passed an $871 billion health care reform plan.
The first three are mildly interesting, I suppose, but they’re hardly of sufficient “breaking” quality to require a blast to what one presumes is hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The last is probably worthy although, frankly, it was a foregone conclusion.
What criteria are being used to judge whether something is “breaking news,” I wonder? Sometimes, days go by without one being sent and sometimes there are several sent in a day. I’m occasionally alerted to important stories that I might otherwise have been unaware of for a couple hours but, mostly, I scratch my head as to why the alert was sent.