[endswapper]

This submission is at least tangentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673489.

Combining these presents an interesting opportunity to create "future news" (news that is technically fake until it isn't) thereby owning the news cycle by always being first.

[PaulHoule]

About 15 years ago I had the good luck of covering a news story before it happened and got a truly tremendous amount of traffic as a result.

[slig]

Can you tell us more about it?

[PaulHoule]

Sure.

There was a series of anti-war protests at a mall around Albany NY in the run up to the second gulf war.

I had been covering the story on a regular basis, but it had gotten very little attention because the media had decided that anti-war protests were not newsworthy.

Well, finally at one of these protests they arrest a judge and that is newsworthy. People start looking for names and places and these match the story I'd written at the last protest (where there had not been any arrests.)

[fjdlwlv]

So you didn't write about a future event

[catshirt]

They said they covered a news story before "it" happened.

If we want to take a considerate interpretation- they wrote about the "news" before the "real news" decided it was "news".

[PaulHoule]

No, a similar set of events happened repeatedly. A group of protesters assembled at a mall, just the last time, the judge got arrested.

Prior to that the exact same judge would make some statement, as would other people. People searching for the story about the arrest would get a story about a previous protest without an arrest and find that everything, except the arrest itself, was pretty much the same.

[akhilcacharya]

I saw a very interesting documentary [0] on just that thesis.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120347/