“Twitter and, within the space of 17 minutes, the Internet-accessing world may have known that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead in his apartment before his three young children, with whom he was scheduled to spend the day, and his longtime partner, Mimi O’Donnell.” The WSJ broke the story with a tweet. And within a few minutes it was everywhere. But would it have really mattered if all of us found out about it a few hours later? That’s a question we no longer even ask these days. We’re in too much of a rush for that. From Salon’s Stacia L. Brown: How breaking news is breaking us.

+ Now more than ever, we need journalists rise above the din instead of getting sucked into it. Here’s a related NextDraft original: Get Off My Stoop.