
The $131M Ford Rollover Death Verdict That Twitter Broke - mjfern
http://www.fastcompany.com/1686864/ford-rollover-verdict-brian-cole-131-million-twitter
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pak
Surely there was a better way to get this story out than piecemeal via 60
staccato tweets? I know this article is supposed to show Twitter is important
"new media" that changes the way news works, but I have never seen such a
salient topic so well destroyed by interjecting hard stops every 140
characters. It was like reading a NY Times editorial in the form of an IRC
chatlog. The format belied the potential of the content.

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jacquesm
Why not post an article and then tweet the link, that's effectively the same
and would be a lot easier on the eyes than trying to piece together a bunch of
tweets.

The funny thing is that with multipart-sms the medium that twitter is copying
is no longer hampered by the this limitation, but the imitator still is.

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anigbrowl
The 'news' here is that the story was put on the internet via Twitter.

 _In this age of instantaneous media, when being first is celebrated more than
being right, and wire services like Bloomberg trumpet beating the competition
by nanoseconds, there are still those rare moments when a major story breaks
and no one is there to report it._

That doesn't mean the story would otherwise have gone unreported; it just
wouldn't have hit the mainstream as quickly.

Usually those big verdicts show up first in the regional legal
newspaper/website within a day or two of the court publication of the opinion.
Sometimes the law firms involved will put out a press release if they've had a
particularly big or legally distinctive win. I'm not sure that condensing the
information down to 140 characters and getting it out first adds any real
benefit; Ford stockholders obviously have an interest in such news, but
generally such things are priced in when the action first comes to court and
after appeals have been exhausted and/or settlements reached.

Funny thing is, the writer wasn't there in court either - he tweeted the
verdict because someone from the plaintiff's office called to update him (he
had written about the attorney and case several times on a freelance basis).
Seems to me that his grumpy tone here is to do with the fact that no existing
media outlet purchased his story or gave him credit for announcing it, despite
its apparent newsworthiness. Unfortunately, the big media outlets are probably
correct in assuming that the public is not very exercised about the death of a
potential baseball star back in 2001, and is already quite well aware of the
fact that Ford Explorers produced in the 1990s had a dangerous tendency to
roll over and that it has cost Ford a ton of money already. It just doesn't
strike me as the hot story the writer considers it to be.

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shortformblog
This is the guy who broke the Stephen Glass plagiarism story back in the day.
He has a history of being first.

EDIT: Steve Zahn played him in "Shattered Glass", which is a pretty great
movie. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323944/>

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WalterBright
The guy was doing 80 and not wearing his seatbelt. I don't see how Ford is to
blame. An SUV is not a sports car.

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bombs
I read over some of the coverage and it stipulates that Cole was wearing a
seatbelt, but due to the give of the seatbelt, he was still ejected.

The Explorer is unsafe, because if it does roll, it will be crushed by its own
weight, regardless of speed. 1 in 2,700 Explorers manufactured between 1990
and 2001, has been involved in a fatal rollover. The numbers are worse for its
predecessor, the Bronco II, where it is 1 in 500.

I couldn't find a source of truth for Cole's speed at the time, but by all
accounts, it didn't sound like he did anything else wrong (he swerved to avoid
a car driving on the wrong side of the road).

