When news broke this morning that Paralympian Oscar Pistorius had shot and killed his girlfriend, every news outlet in the world scrambled to put out some kind of story no matter how sketchy the details.
In this new digital age of journalism, the trick is to be the first (among the first) to report and have the rest of the publications to cite you as the source and give you a back link and get your hit count soaring. It's traffic first and news second. TMZ has taken this story a step further: after updating new information as it
becomes available along with every other news site, they have dug up one of their own old stalking of Pistorius recorded when he was in LA last year and presented it to us as evidence that Pistorius is not a good guy, informed us that Reeva Steenkamp never mentioned domestic violence to friends, and collected her old pictures and presented them in a slideshow in an effort to help us "remember her". I don't know about you but I don't think a slideshow with pictures of a person I didn't know existed until a few hours ago is not going to help me "remember her".
All this and it's not even noon in LA yet. God only knows what they'll have uncovered by the end of the day (other than the traffic that will hit their site for a recycled story that's designed to match the twitter trending topics).
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