The News Cycle, From Fireworks to Fizzle I DON'T remember how old I was when I first climbed up to the roof of my family's home in suburban Maryland. Eleven, maybe? Twelve? But I do remember what I saw up there. It was the night of the Fourth of July, and it was turning dark enough for the fireworks. As I was seated facing south, in the direction of the town closest to me, Damascus, I tried to guess where on the horizon I'd see the first stray green or red or blue shell - the one that serves as a five-minute warning that the show's about to start. But on this night, I didn't see the first explosion in the sky. I heard it. The sound had come from far away, in the direction of a neighboring town, Mount Airy. The fireworks show there had already started, pre-empting my town's. Soon I could see both shows simultaneously, and before long a few families on my street fired off a few shells of their own, and I watched in awe until all I saw in the sky were stars. Today, this is what our news culture looks like to consumers: individual bursts of light that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as fast. What else can we call a story that generates 100 million views on YouTube in a matter of days, garners outrage among young people across the country and spurs several resolutions in Congress - and then practically vanishes? The YouTube views were for a video produced by Invisible Children, a small nonprofit group that was trying to draw attention to Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, an African guerrilla group that has mounted attacks against civilians for more than 20 years. But his name probably needs no explanation now. "KONY 2012," as the video was dubbed, became an international news sensation in early March, "rocketing across Twitter and Facebook at a pace rarely seen for any video, let alone a half-hour film about a distant conflict in Central Africa," as The New York Times put it in a front-page article on March 9. The video succeeded in making Mr. Kony famous, which was the first of the group's stated goals. Maybe a year from now he'll be arrested, as the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has vowed. "Now we have the citizens of the world pushing for that, and that is helping a lot," he told The Associated Press earlier this month. It will be the end of the Joseph Kony crimes. But in the United States, at least, Mr. Kony is no longer in the news or on Twitter's ever-refreshing list of trending topics. Fireworks like "KONY 2012" burn more brightly than they would have in the past, but for better or worse, they tend to be extinguished faster than ever, too. Just ask Jeremy Lin, who's no longer a source of "Linsanity," or Karen Handel, who's no longer a top official at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, or Michele Bachmann, no longer a presidential candidate. Or Rick Perry. Or Herman Cain. If you can remember why they were newsworthy at all. In a few days, ask Hilary Rosen, whose comments about Ann Romney sparked a brief but furious "mommy war" last week. These flash-in-the-pan episodes have long been evident in the entertainment universe. The breakup of a marriage like Kim Kardashian's or the death of a superstar like Whitney Houston prompts instant heehawing and told-ya-so-ing, and a month later we're hard-pressed to remember that it happened at all. But now, the same overreactions happen with political news - when Sarah Palin hints again at running for president or Rush Limbaugh insults a law student on the radio. Except now, instead of asking "Where were you" when a news story flashes before us like a firework, we ask, "Who told you?" Users of social networking Web sites flit from one story to another, attracted by what their friends are saying and what the omnipresent lists of trending topics are stressing. There's a law that might harm the Internet! Beyoncé"s having a baby! There's pink slime in our hamburger meat! You can almost hear the shells bursting in the nighttime sky. "The news itself has become so ubiquitous, so constant that our eyes only pop out when a really shiny object comes flowing down the river," said Jim Bankoff, the head of Vox Media, which operates the sports Web site SB Nation and the technology site The Verge. "People don't just consume it, they "like" it, retweet and e-mail it. All this sharing leads to more sharing, which sets off a trend, which sparks more coverage. Sometimes this can be distracting; sometimes, even suffocating. And yet we seem to gain something from it - a common online conversation. A common ground. Or at the very least, a currency for jokes. AND then, just as suddenly, we switch over to the next big story. Google search rankings, video view records and Twitter trending topics tell users when the crowd has moved on. Then the joke becomes: "Kony who?" Brian Stelter is a media reporter for The New York Times.