CNBC Two-Way Street
RSS FEED
- CNBC Anchor Takes a Sabbatical
- Links: More Important Than We May Think
- Changing What Was Said
- Radio Rounds: A Job Loss and Education
- A Big Net Deal: Getting Staff's Attention
- Site Hot Links? Fear and Greed
- Balloon Boy: Not Your Average Business Story
- Hot Items: Gold, Gifts and Gritty Prison Fights
- Hot Links for Monday
MOST SHARED
- Tiger Woods Out of Hospital After Accident
- The Good Entrepreneur Winner
- Gold Will Collapse Like Oil Did in 2008: Charts
- Abu Dhabi Will Aid Debt-Fraught Dubai 'Case by Case'
- Halftime Report: Dubai - First Ripple Of Larger Crisis?
- CNBC VIDEO: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates 'Walk & Talk' at Columbia University
- U.S. Stocks Fall on Dubai Worries
- Black Friday at Best Buy
- Halftime Report: Dubai - First Ripple Of Larger Crisis?
- Longer Lines, Fuller Carts This Black Friday
- Obama's Emission Reduction Pledge Paints Future for Autos
- Is Super Bowl Halftime Act Too Old?
- EA Sports Hopes to Pump Up Sales Through Pop-Up Locations
- 8 Retailers that Gain During the Holidays
- 4 Enemies of Bull Markets
- Experiencing Technical Difficulty?
Text Size 
Managing Editor, CNBC.com
Well, Balloon Boy was a little overblown yesterday, huh?
Nevertheless, remarkable events like that (well, at the time it was remarkable) bring up a recurring dilemma in business news — should you pay attention to a breaking general news event or not?
Some events are no-brainers because they are so traumatic and far-reaching that they will have reverberations throughout every aspect of the world, business and otherwise. 9/11, for
 |
Is this business news? |
But others are a little more debatable.
The miraculous Hudson landing last January; an attention-getting heroic event, no doubt, but pretty tangential to business news.
Michael Jackson's death.
The winner of the U.S. Open.
Of course, you could find ways to justify things. Jackson's estate is major money (well, sort of). Golf is a mainstay of the CNBC demographic. Airlines are a critical business industry. Given the "Wife Swap" connection and the dubious publicity surrounding the event, we could probably get a money angle on Balloon Boy if we tried hard enough.
Still, you have to make the coverage call as the event is breaking. And your platform affects the choice. It's hard to pass up good television. On the other hand, does that mean giving up covering other important things? And will the breaking news coverage turn out to be worthwhile? In terms of actual "what's important" journalism newspapers, so often labeled as obsolete, have the advantage. Time allows you to bring perspective.
Lucky for Web sites like ours, we can present multiple news-offerings. Covering the balloon's flight yesterday, which we did, didn't mean sacrificing our market coverage or ignoring the business news of the day. We could do it all and let readers decide what they wanted to pay attention to.
So did surfers come to CNBC.com for their Balloon Boy coverage? Nah ... our traffic took a significant dip during that time, in fact.
But at the time it was remarkable. So we had it.
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes