• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 15, 2014

Maybe the same thing has happened to you. Someone yesterday asked, “So what’s this Internet neutrality court decision all about?” And I had someplace to be in a couple hours.

If you, too, wonder, I suggest you visit the go-to source for news, Nowthisnews.com, which the NBC Universal News Group bought a 10% stake in earlier this week. Nowthisnews is backed by Kenneth Lerer, with notches in his belt from Huffington Post (co-founder) and BuzzFeed (chairman), so it’s fair (and kind) to say there’s a guy who know a disruptive idea when he sees one.

Nowthisnews is touted as the news source for a new era of young, smartphone-using consumers who don’t have any zest for traditional news sources, like, say NBC, but just want some facts, fast. If you work in traditional media, it must have some appeal because it is so not what you do. And that means it's doing something right.  

Just a few days before this Nowthisnews deal, the Pew Research Center released survey results claiming only 15% of Americans under 30 recognized a photo of Brian Williams (shown laughing, with Robert DeNiro). All told, only 27% of all Americans, a place which still includes older people, could figure out who the thinner guy in the photo was.

I doubt NBC made the deal with Nowthisnews right after that survey came out. But you never know. Or at least I don’t.  Nowthisnews was all over the Net neutrality story, as you can imagine, because there was a “Net” involved, after all.   

But the Net neutrality story was not in the first news position today. It came behind “Automakers Lure The Youth With Pizza-Buttons,” an investigative-piece length (1 minute, 3 seconds) about how Detroit is adding features to woo back “the youth” to buy cars by offering things like an app that will allow them to order pizzas from the comfort of their front seat.

Net neutrality came second. And here’s the story: “A federal appeals court just changed how the Internet works. The rules used to require that Internet and phone providers give every Web site the same chance, like in terms of speed. But not anymore. Which now means a provider like Verizon could slow down a Time Warner site and speed up its own and that would be perfectly legal.”  

In and out, 14 seconds, 59 words. I used to work for USA Today back when McNews was a slur, and believe me, summing up a complicated issue, stripping it of all details, extracting the complications and serving it up in a semi-readable version is hard work. As Blaise Pascal (philosopher, mathematician, bet God existed, dead) once wrote: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”  

CNET’s Marguerite Reardon must have had no time at all, because she filed 2,000 words about the Net neutrality court ruling. The closest she came to NowThisNews was this 74-word synopsis tucked into the story after a few hundred words:

“In plain English, the court rejected Verizon's argument that the FCC had overstepped its authority to regulate broadband access, instead acknowledging that the FCC has general authority to impose regulations on broadband and wireless service providers. But because the services these providers offer are classified differently from traditional telecommunication services, the justices reasoned in their decision that they are not subject to the same statutes, which guide the agency in forming its regulatory policies.”

Don’t yell at me. I know CNET exists for people who have some familiarity with the issue—after all Nowthisnews didn’t even mention the FCC in its report.  But suppose the issue was something more broadly applicable to everybody’s day-to-day life? Suppose you—and I mean masses of you—really needed to know something? What if getting information meant “just a few minutes” of time spent, not just a few seconds?

To be fair, Nowthisnews does have a separate area with a little more information. But it mainly exists for mobile users who want news on the fly, like they want video on the fly, conversations on the fly, restaurant reviews on the fly. And more or less (and as you can guess, probably less) I’m with them. I use every fast thing. The difference is I use some of the slow ones, too. But if all the best invented and financed new-ness is going to be spent on much, much faster, quicker versions of…nothing, I am so unimpressed.

pj@mediapost.com