In response to a recent Gizmodo article asking “How did you learn about Michael Jackson’s death”:http://gizmodo.com/5303232/qotd-how-did-you-learn-about-michael-jacksons-death, I wanted to ask a more penetrating question:

*How did you verify the news about Michael Jackson’s death?*

In a world where news has to be delivered instantly with the help of Twitter, Facebook, and other sources, I wonder if “old media” (CNN, NBC, etc.) is still where people turn to when they want to verify news. I caught wind of Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter, but considered it just a rumor until multiple news organization websites confirmed the news for me.

Now I wouldn’t trust a single news source, but I still consider Twitter and the like to be gossip vehicles rather than news vehicles. I know that CNN won’t always get the story right, but I certainly trust CNN more than the average Twitter user. But Twitter does shine when it comes to bringing to light under-reported stories as in the recent Iranian election. But now even that has become almost impossible to follow on Twitter. The amount of noise created by re-tweets, imposters, and users abusing the #iranelection tag has annoyed me to the point of dropping Twitter as a source on the topic.

Twitter is there mainly for entertainment and is there occasionally for news, but I still laugh when people brag about hearing the news first on Twitter. I usually follow up their naiveté with news that “Bill Gates’s new email tracing program that will earn them a $1000″:http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/billgate.asp!