False starts

 The Los Angeles Lakers finally released their hostage coach yesterday, but Frank Vogel returning to his loved ones from Bizarro World is not what this is about. This is about how Vogel found out he was being released.

Which is to say, the Lakers didn't tell him. Some Magic Twitter Machine jockey did.

This jock is named Adam Wojnarowski, and he's ESPN's top NBA "insider." He broke the story with a tweet. Unfortunately, he broke it before it was a story; the Lakers, true to their clown-show selves, hadn't gotten around to telling Vogel themselves yet. It was the journalistic version of a false start.

In any event, Vogel found out from Woj, and if that's on the Lakers for being (to borrow some "Letterkenny" lingo) a backward effing pageantry, it's as much on Woj. And  with that, the Blob will indulge in its periodic geezer lecture, "How Journalism Really Works."

("No!" you're protesting. "Not AGAIN!")

Yes, again.

See, here's how what happened yesterday happens, in the geezer's opinion: Because journos do not inhabit the same reality as their readers. Journos, like Woj, believe readers care who gets the story first. 

They don't. Not really. Most of the time -- especially in an age when information (and disinformation) comes at us from a bewildering array of sources -- readers couldn't tell you on a bet where they saw something first.

What they can tell you is where they saw it best.

Which is to say, you can rush a story into print in two days and beat the competition to the punch, but if the competition has spent six months reporting, writing and editing the same story, that's the version readers are going to remember. That will be the definitive narrative, simply because there's no way it can't be.

Now, this is not to say news organizations shouldn't try to be first.  They should. That will always be a driving motivation for disseminators of news, simply by the nature of news.

But Who Gets It First is a conceit mostly for news organizations themselves. It's a marketing tool that's mainly for the people doing the marketing. Who Gets It Right (or Best, or Most Memorably) is what really sells the book, as print journos like to say. 

Lecture concluded. Class dismissed.