Does it matter who breaks the news?

When I worked on newspapers, my team and I had a running joke, albeit a macabre one, about which designer would have the temerity to die over a weekend, interrupting our end of week wines, or scuppering our Sunday roasts. 

I was reminded of this when news reached me via Instagram on Friday evening that Roberto Cavalli had died. ‘Breaking: Roberto Cavalli Has Died’, flashed the email alert from Business of Fashion, eventually. BoF is often the first to break big fashion news, but on this occasion, it was pipped to the post by several Instagram accounts. 

Obviously, I’m sorry to hear about Cavalli’s passing. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder: does it matter who is first with the news of his death? Does it matter who is first with the news that Alessandro Michele is going to Valentino, or Puig wants to go public? Times have changed beyond recognition from when I was fashion editor of the London Evening Standard, and the paper printed five editions a day. If a story broke at 11am GMT, it could be in the early afternoon edtition. Covering New York Fashion Week, a morning show would miss every UK broadsheet and tabloid deadline, but not ours. We could – and did – run the story the same day. 

Now, we get our breaking news from social media. Not even television can keep up with the hive mind efficiency of X, Instagram and Tiktok. Print media can provide depth, accuracy and (we hope) truth, but speed? Not so much. From a PR’s point of view, ‘first with the news’ isn’t the USP it used to be. Whatever the news and whoever breaks it, it spreads in an instant, and can only ever be ‘exclusive’ for a nanosecond – food for thought when you’re pitching an ‘exclusive’.