Actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment at 3:31 EST today, and the news was out in less than 90 minutes.
It’s always a saddening time when someone unexpectedly dies, and he was quite the talented actor who will be missed. Frankly, I’m even more interested in seeing his performance as The Joker in the upcoming Batman film The Dark Knight as it was his last. I also took a minute to wander over to his Wikipedia entry, and to my surprise, it had already been updated (see screen capture taken at 3:06 MDT).
The Speed of News
It’s frightening how fast news travels in the year 2008, but it’s also a lesson to companies, people and PR practitioners. News moves at rocket speed, and it no longer becomes tomorrow’s bird-cage liner with the advent of the Internet, social networks (I read it first on Digg) and other online sources that index their news to be read for years to come.
Are the lines blurring between SEO and PR? Absolutely. And the PR person who doesn’t adjust may just end up cleaning bird cages instead of practicing PR.
RIP to Heath Ledger, 28, born in Perth, Australia.
Films
6 comments ↓
If you believe that public relations (PR) is nothing more than getting a client listed highly in search engines for specific words, then yes, SEO is the new PR. However, if you believe PR involves relationships, trust building, and approaches that benefit the client and audience alike then SEO is only a new tool, not an equivalent discipline.
As an aside, the RSS feed that was sent out contained “P.S. I recommend: Anderson Window Well Covers, and Cabo San Lucas Real Estate by Cabo Prudential”. I understand that this is probably an automated feature of whatever ad platform you’re using. However, the appearance of trying to profit from someone’s death is troubling. What ad service are you using?
hmmm….
i’ll have to fix that “Ad stuff”
it’s even more interesting to me to know how fast the news that President Hinkley died got out. I had two texts withing 45 minutes telling me of his passing. Gotta love news in the text messaging age.
I remembered this post about Heath Ledger & wikipedia when I saw the news on Sunday night regarding Pres. Hinckley’s passing. Sure enough, as quickly as I looked at wikipedia - the date he passed away was already updated….it wasn’t even 9pm yet.
Bill -
Are you related to Mike Fronce? I went to school at BYU with a Mike Fronce, and I don’t see that name often.
Russell
Leave a Comment