How fast is fast enough?

A recent Technology Review article that examined the possibility that Google might purchase the popular online suggesting service Digg, hinted that Google News isn't fast enough for the news starved:

... many experts in the field believe that it lags behind other online news services in providing timely updates on big stories. For instance, it took Google News about an hour to report on Tim Russert's death from when the news first hit the wires. Google publicly claims that this was due to a glitch, but even when everything is running smoothly, its speed still isn't impressive: it took the site about 25 minutes to post a story on Donald Rumsfeld's resignation two years ago, while the news hit the front page of Digg within minutes.

Were these truly "need to know" topics, the knowledge of which, minutes before someone else, gave someone some sort of advantage? I doubt it. These were news stories that, as interesting and perhaps even as important, as they might have been, could have waited for the evening news.

Go to: More, more, give me more!, or
Go to: Actually, I could have waited.