The most popular A-list blogs become go-to sources by posting breaking news first before anybody else. Wired has chronicled how cut-throat the competition is. Now, “everybody media” is out there trying to get breaking news up on YouTube and on their blogs.

Tonight’s SNL appearance of Sarah Palin has all the trappings of being a historic media event combining politics and laughs. The East Coast has the advantage as YouTube devotees set up their vidcams in front of their TVs at 11:30EDT for “taping” and subsequent posting on YouTube. The winners are rewarded with lots of traffic to their YouTube site.

This simple news-gathering linkbaiting strategy will snowball into a massive social media trend – “everybody media” – where individuals seek to become go-to news sources.

I’m hoping that SNL plays it straight up and provides Palin with a script that has her do Weekend Update impersonating Tina Fey’s role.

UPDATE 10/18/08 9:30pm PDT: Huffington Post posts Sarah Palin on SNL, who is getting uniformly poor reviews on Election.Twitter.com. What a wasted opportunity for both NBC and Palin… just see how Obama and McCain shine as comedians in their own right in the previous article Obama and McCain do Stand-Up.

Remarkable satire arises from inspired individuals. Here’s a brilliant, detailed Sarah Palin Facebook parody noted by Valleywag:

See next article: Social Media Satire – Corporate Generated

Link to SNL Video of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin 10/4/08

We Westcoasters get a full three hours of excellent Tina Fey reviews on Twitter before SNL airs in California…

What NBC should do: Start advertising your shows in real time with scrolling Twitter quotes in a :15 second spot. I’m certainly tuning in.

Yesterday, decidedly liberal Daily Kos posted an article speculating a Thomas Eagleton-like bombshell about Sarah Palin covering up the fact that her Down’s Syndrome son Trig is possibly her grandson, and that Trig was birthed by Sarah Palin’s daughter who was 16 at the time. Although the shocking claim is tabloidish, the fact is the speculation is now out there (the article received over 1,600 comments over a 24-hour span, many of which leaning towards credibility) and eventually will have to be addressed by the McCain campaign… perhaps even during their convention.

More interesting is the mainstream media (even the well followed liberal HuffPost) has not touched the story in 24-hours, preferring the cautious vetting process that was used with John Edwards / Rielle Hunter earlier this month. The shoot-from-the-hip versus caution-by-fear-of-libel-lawsuit is a profound difference between the social media and mainstream media. It makes me wonder why the mainstream media CNN, NBC, etc. don’t set up subsidiary channels/social networks that can address the fact these tabloidish speculations exist. With social media / social news on the uptick, these kind of stories will surface and be vetted socially for their credibility and value.

The first place I thought most appropriate to initiate the discussion on this topic is Social Median, a new application devoted to vetting news socially.

The surprise announcement of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican VP candidate highlights the relevancy of different media in reporting breaking news:

1. Twitter breaks the news

2. Concurrently, TV news – MSNBC, CNN, CNBC – gathers initial pundit reactions that generally mirror the Twitter feeds. The online business news sites also report the news, but don’t seem to have real time access to pundits for commentary

3. Finally, about one hour later after the news breaks, the Anchorage Daily News (and by extension, other newspaper websites) provide a snippet announcement with no editorial, interpretation or commentary

4. Penultimately, newsprint publication 24 hours later with the morning paper. Simply put, stale news makes newsprint irrelevant from a knowledge management standpoint.

5. News weeklies – Time, Newsweek, The Economist, even People – distill the reactions and interpret the breaking news. Some do it better than others.