There once was a time after dinosaurs and before Twitter, when people got breaking news from cable news channels. It was a chief reason why I began my career working at one whose initials start with a C and end with an N, decades ago.

I remember one incident late in August 1985. It was after midnight. We were reporting on a small commuter plane that crashed in Maine, killing all eight people on board. The supervising producer looked stunned as he hung up the telephone and told us, “Samantha Smith was on that plane.”