Wikipedia Updater Fired For Scooping NBC on Tim Russert's Death
When Tim Russert collapsed ten days ago, his colleagues at NBC held off reporting the news for almost two hours so his family wouldn’t hear about it from the media. They also asked other TV networks to hold off reporting it, which they apparently agreed to do. A decade ago, when TV and radio had a lock on real-time news dissemination, this cozy arrangement might have stopped the news from spreading. In this day and age, of course, it didn’t. The news appeared on Wikipedia 40 minutes before the NBC report, with all of the verbs in Tim’s entry changed from present tense to past. It appeared on the New York Times’s web site 5 minutes before the NBC story. It zipped around Twitter all afternoon.
Wikipedia Updater Fired For Scooping NBC on Tim Russert’s Death - Silicon Alley Insider