Heard it through the grapevine
I don't think I keep up with the news as often as I should. Well, that's how my dad makes me feel about that subject: always telling me to read the paper or watch the 6 o'clock news. I haven't had him nag me about that for years now that I don't have to live with him ( :P ) so I have to remind myself to keep up with the latest.
Without having a newspaper delivered to my doorstep, my #1 news source is (quite obviously for anybody of my generation or younger) the internet, and has been that way since maybe 2002 when our family got what passed for broadband back in those days. My RSS feed is filled with technology and developer news, I subscribe to several podcasts that I listen to or watch while doing chores or eating dinner in-front of the TV, blogs give me more personal stories from around the world, I'm on Twitter, and the fan pages I've 'Like'd on Facebook (and haven't filtered-out of my news feed) keep me up-to-date with all sorts of things.
This way, I can make sure the news that reaches me is relevant to me, and news that I care about.
I even remember a few years ago I was playing Counter-Strike on some Australian servers (back when I had the free time to enjoy lots of multiplayer gaming) and the server chat and strong Aussie accents from those with headphones started going on about how London had just been bombed by terrorists. I stopped playing and turned on the TV to find-out more.
That's what I was doing during the London bombings of 2005.
With all the news sources I have on the internet, there was one place that I never imagined would tell me anything useful, let alone anything I wanted to know: YouTube comments.
Yup, the place where common sense sheds a tear and humanity comes to die, YouTube comments have historically been the place for all sorts of people to vent any kind of bullshit, relevant or not, to the video being played: racism, sexism, rape, paedophilia, how they went down on your mum, et cetera et cetera. Yet, just the other day I was watching a Paramore music video on YouTube (my brother and I are big fans) and on the comments I read people posting over and over again about how Josh and Zac Farro, members of Paramore, should come back.
"What the hell?" I thought, so I followed it up with a few searches, and lo and behold, I learned that those 2 guys had just left Paramore and that the announcement was made official the day before. I shared it with my brother, and he wasn't very happy about it either.
It was news that was relevant to me, news that I cared about, and I didn't learn of it over Twitter or Facebook or any of my RSS feeds; I learned about it on some YouTube comments.