ABSTRACT
Much of daily journalism for nearly two centuries has focused on being fast and first. The extra editions of newspapers on city streets in the 1890s and the radio reports of the London bombings in World War Two illustrate how fast delivery of news (using the new technologies of the times) established journalism reputations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The live television coverage of the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to live reporting from war zones in Iraq in March, 2003 and the Twitter and Skype reports from democratic protests in Egypt in February, 2011 all show that news audiences value the latest news delivered in the quickest and most reliable way.
