For all the news you may have missed...come back Sunday!

The other day, my brother and I were talking about a long-running
weekly television show that features a round table of sports reporters. Each week they recap the top stories from the past seven days and offer their opinions on these stories. Neither of us could understand why the show was still on the air.

“No one wants to wait a week to hear what these guys have to say about stories we already know!” he said.

He’s absolutely right - we don’t.

And although this particular show deals with the world of sports, it has become true of all news. No one waits until Sunday to find out what happened this week. “News you may have missed” no longer makes any sense.We didn’t miss it. It was on our computer moments after it happened. It was delivered to our phone while we were in the grocery store. We don’t need anyone to bundle it up for us and deliver it long after it happened.

Of course it wasn’t always this way and shows like this made sense. Growing up, I waited for the evening paper to be delivered to my house five nights a week and a little earlier on Saturday. The evening news on television was merely video to support the stories I had read in my daily newspaper, but rarely anything new. Back then, we were used to getting our news a day after it happened, sometimes later. Shows that offered a more in-depth look at the top stories of the week were interesting because we hadn’t heard it all before.

But times have changed. Today we not only want the information immediately, we want access to more information, more interaction. We watch shows like HBO’s 24/7 and hear what players say on the bench, on the ice and in their hotel rooms. We live chat with news reporters as they’re on the air and follow their tweets to learn what they’re thinking about the story they told us seconds earlier.

The community newspaper that comes out twice a week is viewed as laughably slow. Company newsletters that publish weekly or monthly badly miss their employees who wanted their information long before then. Worse yet, they complain that the company has kept them in the dark and withheld information they were anxious to receive.

Weekly and monthly meetings, once the staple of effective organizations, are replaced by ad hoc collaboration and debriefing that occurs in real time (and in many organizations, constantly). Blogs, wikis and intranets are updated as information becomes available, not around the predetermined publishing timelines of yesterday.

If we’re responsible for sharing information within our organizations, with our customers, or with an audience of any kind, we need to understand the new expectation.

No one is going to wait until Sunday.