Twitter ruins NASA's big day

If you haven't heard by now the moon has water on it. This may come as a surprise because you would think the media would be all over it, fighting for who can upload the big news to the website the quickest. But instead it slowly drizzled out media outlet after media outlet. The Times got the story out Wednesday 23 September but most of the other news outlets didn't until the next day. So how did this happen? The journal, Science, who was doing the research put out an embargo on the story, and instead the plan was that the news would be announced at a NASA press conference. However, the blogging world got news of the embargo and once they saw what the study was investigating they put two and two together. With the rumours making waves across the Net India's mainstream press reported the story. The Times' Delhi correspondent then picks up the story and it makes the top of their website as an exclusive. As David Gregory writes on the BBC:

Eventually the journal Science sees the cat is out of the bag, drop the embargo at 22.57 our time last night and all the British science journalists who've obeyed the embargo wake up to find they've missed one of the biggest days for the moon since we walked on it.

Gregory goes on to make a valid point. The internet makes embargoes designed to keep a story a surprise are nearly impossible. All it does is inhibit mainstream news organizations that have agreed to abide by it. Gregory writes:

But in these days of a global, 24-hour news media the process appears to be broken. You can't shut up bloggers and you can't shut down Twitter. The only thing that can go is the embargo system itself.