We've been Newsroomed

"Senseless."

Justin Trudeau chose an apt word to describe the horror that broke Boston's heart this week.

We agree, shake our heads and shudder. 

If we work in media, however, we will try to make sense of it.

We will scramble for sources and work the phones, the contacts, and these days, keep a sharp eye on Twitter and all the myriad new media that can make traditional sources seem to play catch up.  

It is a dizzying race to get there first. 

Last year, our family got caught up in this very circus from the safety of our couch.  We began to watch HBO"s The Newsroom. Written by the brilliant Aaron Sorkin, the show was constructed around real life news stories delivered by an idealistic prime time cable news crew. It was hardly a hit as many critics deplored Sorkin's preachy characters and levelled charges at him of elitism and bias. True but are we to believe bias isn't evident everywhere else? I kept watching but that's no surprise.  Call me a sucker for literate speechifying and witty repartee. Old movies with flinging quips have me enthralled and I don't care if no one I know talks like this. No one I know is Ironman either. The point is an idealized version of humanity, which Sorkin's The West Wing did with perfection. I fell for the cast and the romantic underpinnings and ignored the irritating low points, for few writers on television can make the heart soar quite like Sorkin.

Now it turns out from the real life coverage of the Boston bombings, that Sorkin got it right, making him a prescient philosopher king who may also be a pompous ass for all I know but that's beside the point.

Earlier in the week, we saw that race to be first result in inaccurate reporting, first from CNN's breathless announcement, picked up by other news organizations, that a suspect was in custody. By the end of the day, they were backpedalling. This is hardly new and few journalists are innocent-we've all made mistakes in the search for the story. But these days, when the method of getting the story has been turned upside down, I wonder if all that craft that went into reporting is dead.

So what? Isn't it more democratic to demolish top down business models and allow all of us to make our own news? The immediacy of Twitter is damn seductive-we are enthralled and now accustomed to rapid fire discoveries. But when you work in a newsroom, as I did a million years ago ( see here) and discover there are rules to follow and methods to mine, you understand and respect that process and craft do more for the story than just getting it out. Suddenly, I hear news reporters on radio and television, adding qualifying tag lines" this is a developing story" or a "fluid story" or introducing their show as champions of "long form journalism". Restraint has always been important in complicated news stories but now, it appears to be a choice that one makes and then announces to others as an apology or...

 a triumphant line in the sand.

Or not. Here is how it played out on CNN.

Here is the now infamous episode of Sorkin's fictional but not-so-much Newsroom as they handle the news of Gaby Giffords' shooting. The episode"I'll try to fix you" has, says Salon magazine, become " prescriptive and culturally omnipresent" as the Twitter world lit up this week with references to Sorkin's show. It's worth watching the whole clip, if only to imagine a world where people actually behaved in this manner, and not just in Sorkin's imagination. While you watch, keep in mind that The Newsroom was renewed for a second season which will begin this July on HBO.  I'll be watching.