Old News, New Trends

It should not come as a surprise to you to learn that Brittany Murphy died almost a month ago now. It was a bizarre turn of events for which we still do not quite have closure. Once the final autopsy reports are released, we'll either have the flash-in-the-pan scandal many have been expecting, or else we'll have the quiet reminder of our own fragile mortalities.

Anyway.

I loved Brittany Murphy. Between her endearing portrayal of Tai in Clueless and her downright wacky night on SNL, I saw her as an actress with charm and a slight counterculture edge, and it's easy to gloss over her string of rather nondescript roles now.

So, like many others, on the day that she died I went straight to YouTube to look up the famous "rolling with the homies" clip. Then I looked for but did not find her "Leather Store" skit on SNL. Ah, well.

Since then, I've had at least one recommendation every night in the vein of the following video:



Not much to say here. It takes this girl a whole minute just to say that Brittany Murphy died, but she is one of many vloggers just like her who recorded entire videos just to say that this had happened. As this girl notes in response to negative comments, she was just trying to report the breaking news.

This kind of hive-mind-journalism is an increasingly popular way of disseminating news. I, myself, learned of Brittany Murphy's death from the swarm of facebook status updates it caused. And just look at this video, which received over 16,000 views for a user whose other videos average in the five- to six-hundred range. We want to see what other people are saying, even if we have no idea who they are or what their authorities are. Unlike those boring newscasters on TV, we might even find someone just like us, putting into words what we were feeling but couldn't articulate about the breaking news in question.

On the other hand, we could find lots of false information. I can think of a few Twilight rumors that sent my sister into panic attacks because one false report led to torrents of personal postings on the internet, which made those rumors look like valid news stories. It's easy to assume there is truth in the numbers.

Anyway.

This was a bad recommendation. Personal reporting is dated instantly, especially the kind like this that offers no information or commentary worth listening to even once. But as a kind of lure into this girl's other videos, I'd say she was well served posting *something* about a popular piece of news. I wish her all the best in her future journalism career...