With all the blogs, message boards, talk radio, cable news scrolls and instant access to information in general, we now live in a world where rumor has replaced the lead as the focus of what constitutes news.

You no longer need a reliable source; you just need a source, which is “close to the situation.” Basically, your source knows a guy who knows a guy. It’s an urban legend approach to news gathering. Over the years, Eddie Murphy became Mike Tyson who became Michael Jordan who became Will Smith who became LeBron James who gave a lady a bouquet of $100 bills for a misunderstanding in an elevator. [citation needed] In sports it’s banned substances. Over the years, uppers became cocaine, which became ephedrine, which became steroids, which became HGH as the speculative lead to run with until we find out exactly what player X took. If you have a cold or are on a diet, there's a good chance you coudn't pass a sports drug test. Genetic Enhancers the media can't wait for you to get here soon enough.

Every major news outlet has adopted this philosophy of blurring the line between news and rumor.  This is to the detriment of actual stories in an actual news cycle. There is no such thing as a “probable” fact, that’s just a hypothesis which needs to be proven which is just an opinion based on a subjective, poorly calculated assumption. That’s not ‘news’ worthy to be broken.

And you know who is taking it on the chin, newspapers. Sure they screwed up the whole Internet thing, with their archaic model and nearsighted understanding of what it was or going to be, but still. They are going extinct and they may even be the ones who started it. Yeah, I’m looking at you columnists who just flamed the fire du jour over and over again. We don’t need you anymore because we have PTI, Around the Horn and big media tweets or "Live Blogs" from sources close to the situation.

Now everybody’s doing it at a much quicker rate, on an hourly basis instead of a daily basis, for free. Twitter, RSS feeds, Digg etc. have taken your “lead” newspapers and run with it. Hell, they don’t even employ anyone; they use us to do it for them. We all contribute posts as opinionated ‘takes’ on what could possibly be fact and they merely disseminate it. Then, we all comment on it immediately and rate each other's comments. (Not that there is anything wrong with that. Don't hate me Q.) You brought this crap on yourselves newspaper editorial page, op ed. page and letters to the editor. “Damn right, good point!” Hell, I'm doing it right now. A blog post speculating that speculation killed newspapers. Think about it.

This just brings me back to why we can’t or won’t wait for stories to develop anymore. We need it now because we are all cynically thinking the same thing and need to be immediately validated. When everybody is thinking the same thing, nobody’s thinking. That’s where we are. Nobody’s thinking, everybody’s reacting with the same tired take.

Sports insiders and political pundits are the absolute worst. They are nothing more than rumormongers on the information highway to hell. News shouldn’t be just calculated guesses and calculated guesses shouldn’t be just good informational intentions and good intentions shouldn’t always lead to you know where. But they do. These experts “Are who we thought they were!” …before we became them ourselves.

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