How fast can you become old news?

Okay, here's your current events question of the day:

Does news get old faster on the web or on TV and newspapers?

(whistle the jeopardy theme song a minute.....)

Remember the two Current TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee captured in North Korea?  Well they've disappeared, at least as far as media is concerned.

Lee and Ling were taken about three weeks ago as they were working on a report for Current TV (Al Gore's project) for their Vanguard series.  Reporters Without Borders reported that they were investigating the human trafficking networks that smuggle women out of North Korea sell them in China.  This is way more touchy than the usual fare on Current TV, which can be YouTubeish at times.

Do a Google search for ‘Laura Ling', and the top listing is an old interview she did, followed by listings from March.  Click on Google's news and the latest is an April 6th article on Huffington Post.

Try Yahoo News.  Zip.. not even in the top page.   Try a twitter search (I know just the of searching twitter is a bit odd).... A little better... about 8 posts from the last day or so...but all asking about what happened to them.

I suspect the lack of coverage is because the dialogue has changed.  Now it's all about how Obama is going to deal with ‘his first crisis' - anyone taking American hostages - such as the recent ship captain taken by pirates off the Somali Coast and before that journalist Roxana Saberi, accused by the Iranians of espionage and held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.

There is one recent post by Joe Bua who actually called up Current TV yesterday and asked why there wasn't any mention on their website of the women.  Their answer was that ‘they can't comment right now'.  Now I agree with Bua that it is a matter of diplomacy, but what I don't get is the reaction of the entire new media space.  In many ways the new media space is much like the old.  If  Obama happens to bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, that's headline news (1,240,000 search results on Google)- new media or old.

I promise to lighten up next time...