So, a minor news story of the day is that John Roberts is not stepping down as the Chief Justice of the United States. Of course, John Roberts never was stepping down as the CJOTUS (that's an acronym, right?).

The tl;dr is that, to make a point, a Georgetown Law professor mentioned it to his class to see how quickly the rumor would spread (full story via zittrain).

All of which got me to thinking about the place of the scoop in this brave new world of realtime journalism.

So, here's my take: the scoop is nothing new — my mind settles on the image of shabby old-timey reporters mulling around the the police department looking for a lead on a juicy story. But at least, at that time, the material world provided some form of sanity check: The presses only rolled once a day. And there weren't that many of them.

So this checked the tremendous journalistic pressure to be first.

But the immediacy of news continues its march from those days of the daily. Television brought us the moon landing live. Cable news brought us, well, everything live. And while the number of sources multiplied, they were still numerable, monied, and lasting, with reputations to maintain and advertisers to appease.

What's the check, then, on today's push-button publishers?

The answer: nothing, really. You press enter and it's out there.

This is what I love about Professor Tague's stunt: he plays 'em for it. He knows their weakness: the meta-journalists' willingness to echo hearsay as news, and fast — 'cause if they're wrong, they're wrong. But if they're right, they're first.