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This drives me nuts.

You see this sort of thing a lot from weather and other local news pepople like Siri Bill Henley, who insist on teasing their on-air spots or giving you easily-available-online-information like it’s a public service of some sort. Examples:

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Nothing against Brian Seltzer – I’m sure his SportsCenter update was great – since he’s not the only one to do this, but his Tweet, as wells as all of these, are completely useless. THE WEB, as a medium, is consumer focused. It doesn’t care about what you have to promote. It’s a free-roam democracy in every sense of the word. Sort of like how video games in the late-90s introduced the open-world concept, where you could go anywhere, do anything, and not play the game in a linear series of checkpoints defined by some other being. Old school, mainstream media is the platform gamer, presenting information when and how it wants. The Internet is Super Mario 64 (or, if you prefer, Grand Theft Auto)– go wherever you want, mostly in whatever order you want. Point is: Media folks pretending like they’re the gatekeeper of some great, secret factoid that only they can distribute is as tone-deaf as it is pointless. It’s silly to think that someone who’s connected enough to be using Twitter would really feel the need to tune in for an exclusive weather report, score update, or coach’s quote. I’m all for promoting genuinely interesting or unique things online (if 97.5 tweeted about an upcoming interview for Lenny Dykstra, for example), but tweeting a silly teaser for something that could be found by a simple Google search is just a waste of time. It’s the same idea as when a reporter or news outlet Tweets a widely available factoid and acts as if they’re your only source of this cherised information:

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THANKS, BILL!

THANKS, BILL!

Sans 140-character limit, here’s another way to rewrite Seltzer’s Tweet: If you’re not in your car listening (and, really, why would you be since you’re reading this right now?), see if you can find an old in-home radio or go to our website and launch the live player (but make sure you have flash installed first!), because we’re going to play for you audio of a comment a football coach made to dozens of reporters which you could just Google in the time that it takes you to tune in.

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I’d estimate that preciesely no one tuned in solely to hear the SportsCenter update. Or turned on NBC 10 to see Hurricane’s weather report instead of just going here. Or has ever interacted with a Bill Henley Tweet. I don’t know. Am I an astute observer? Am I an asshole? Tune in tonight at 11 to find out… or, just Google it.

UPDATE: This is what I’m talking about: