The Battle for Context: The Distributed Content Landscape

How fast is fast enough?

It is striking that whenever distributed content and the evolution of news is discussed, all that seems to matter is speed and number of shares. Coco Chanel famously said “La mode c’est ce qui se démode” – fashion is what becomes unfashionable, and by the same token you could say what goes viral becomes uninteresting as soon as the next viral thing comes along. If the attitude to news production boils down to however fast you move, it’s never fast enough, then there are many things publishers are traditionally very good at that get discarded by the wayside – not because they are useless or dead, but just because they create less immediate buzz.