Julian Edelman Arrest Story Heightened By Social Media, Sports Radio

It's amazing the point we've reached today. It's a vague statement, I know, but sometime you have to marvel at the incredible progress that we've made as a society, especially when it comes to social media and reporting.

Nowadays, you can literally get instant news online, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (that still exists?) or whatever medium you use. The days of waiting for today's news in tomorrow's newspaper are long, long gone.

Take the Julian Edelman story, for example (remember, right now this is all alleged). News broke on Tuesday morning that Edelman was arrested and charged with indecent assault and battery and was set to be arraigned at Boston Municipal Court. Instead of waiting for the story details to be in tomorrow's paper, the story unfolded right before our eyes.

The story was first reported by The Boston Globe, and Fred Toucher and Rich Shertenlieb of the Toucher & Rich morning show on 98.5 The Sports Hub picked up on the story quickly. After coming back from a commercial break, they reported the news about Edelmen and also said that they had been receiving text messages all morning from one person who was reporting the news about Edelman, but the Globe report was the first official word about it.

Then, they took to the internet. The team of Toucher Shertenlieb and Hub Headlines anchor (and birthday boy) Jon Wallach reported the latest updates coming on Boston.com and on Twitter. As new reports kept coming out, they kept their listeners informed and looked up the definition of the charges. They even took a call from a policeman, who helped explain the charges to them.

To me, this stuff is just amazing. Isn't it just incredible how we can see and hear news develop right before our eyes? It's definitely a sign of the times, and you wonder if and how the reporting of news can get even faster and more informative as time goes on.