When Michael Jackson’s death was broken first by a celebrity gossip blog, I and many others considered this a sign of things to come, with the Internet taking over from traditional media and news organizations. But while speed and timing is one thing, legitimacy and trustworthiness are another. On that score, traditional media still rules.

The death of Michael Jackson was a shock to all except those in his inner circle, an inner circle which has dwindled considerably in recent years. The news was so sudden, so unexpected that people refused to believe it when they first read, heard or were told about it.

TMZ.com (the TMZ standing for the Thirty Mile Zone around Hollywood) was the first Web site to break the news of Jacko’s death, beating competitors to the story by hours. As HitWise has revealed today, this saw TMZ receive a huge increase in traffic.

TMZ’s traffic rose to a three-year high, rising by five times the amount recorded the day before Michael Jackson passed away. The previous high, experienced when TMZ published photos of Rihanna after she’d been allegedly beaten up by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown, was superseded by an 18 percent rise in visitor numbers, with 61 percent of total visits coming from new readers.

However, while TMZ rose from 305th to 60th in terms of the market share of visits, the big, longstanding, traditional media news sites still dominated proceedings. Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC, and Google News took the top 4 ranking in the ‘News and Media’ sector, with MSNBC and CNN receiving traffic spikes of 67 percent and 64 percent respectively.

There’s a simple and undeniable reason for this: although TMZ got there first, it was the well-known, trustworthy sites which people turned to in order to find the truth. TMZ has a good record of being both first with news and accurate, but it also has the luxury of being able to gamble as to whether news is correct or not, especially when timing is everything on the Web.

The Internet is certainly a huge part of the news market these days, but sourcing, reasoning, and accuracy still rule the roost over being the first to break a story. Maybe one day TMZ will join the ranks of those traditional media sites which everyone knows they can rely on, but for now it’s still classed as a tabloid-style risk to be wary of believing.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 8:06 pm under Blogosphere, Internet, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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