How I learned about Stuart Scott and what it means for the future of media

Stuart Scott was a broadcaster at ESPN. Arguably one of the best, I remember him as the guy who always got the Jordan interviews. Therefore, he was my guy.

Sadly, he lost his battle with cancer this weekend. He will be missed.

The way I found out about his passing was I think indicative of the shift in how we consume media.

I didn’t learn about it by reading the paper (don’t get it). I didn’t learn about it from watching the news (don’t watch it). I didn’t learn about it from Flipboard, Feedly or Twitter (all of which I use for news consumption). Nor did I learn about it from my friends posting about it on Facebook.

I learned about it from LeBron James. No, he didn’t text me the news (true, I do hang with Shaq, but so far Bron Bron has never texted me back).

I learned about it from LeBron’s Instagram account.

Think about that for a minute. I’m on ESPN.com all the time and I listen to ESPN podcasts. I rarely go more than a few hours without checking one of my news sources. Yet I learned about this on Instagram, a photo-sharing site (that, frankly, I never thought would take off yet its my #1 social network).

What this tells me is that media is continuing to be broken into bite-sized chunks and consumers of that media want to get it when they want, and in what form they want. And they can, because if the news sources won’t provide it, other people will.