News cycles

One of my final posts for last week dealt with the recent emergence of a new swine flu strain in Mexico. Over the weekend, that little news story became one of the major headlines around the world.

On my iGoogle start page, I have several widgets. One of those shows me the top 5 stories from National Public Radio. On Sunday, 4 of the 5 stories showing there were about the swine flu. As I write this, none of them are. In fact, here's what I'm seeing right now:

Since the threat posed by this new strain of the flu definitely hasn't gone away, we can only assume that this is the product of a very quick news cycle. In order to attract readers, online news sources are forced to constantly update their feeds to provide newer and fresher stories. Sometime this means that the big or important stories can get buried pretty quickly.

When I looked at this closer, though, I noticed the fourth story. "Strong Earthquake Felt in Mexico City". As in "the same Mexico City that is reeling from the new flu outbreak". Holy crap! This is starting to look more and more like a certain online video game that I've discussed here before.