internet-broadcasting-services

Employee at NBC contractor fired for network on Russert death

Nicholas Carlson · 06/23/08 03:00PM

When Meet The Press host Tim Russert died, NBC held the news so it could inform Russert's family first. An employee at Internet Broadcasting Services, which provides web services for some of NBC affiliates, went ahead and updated Russert's Wikipedia page anyway. Then the New York Times saw the update and broke the news before NBC itself. NBC executives heard about the slip, got upset and now, IBS has responded by firing the employee who updated the page. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka and Henry Blodget say IBS shouldn't have fired the employee and that NBC should get with the times. Citizen journalism happens, Blodget writes, "and the genie isn't going back in the bottle." Except what the IBS employee did wasn't "citizen journalism."