CNN.com Redefines “Live,” “Developing”

As I often do when I first get in the office every morning, I logged onto CNN.com to see if I missed any news during my terrifyingly long 20 minute commute.When the page loaded, I was greeted by a red and black banner at the top. “Live Developing Story,” it declared. Obviously something important was happening, and I couldn’t afford to miss it.

Or could I?

Check out the screengrab below to see what I mean.

Yeah, apparently a replay of last night’s primetime presidential news conference counted as live, developing news. This even though it definitely wasn’t live, hadn’t been developing for 12 hours, and was already a story since well before CSI: Miami came on last night (By the way, did you see Diddy playing that defense attorney? The man is not a good actor).

This sort of banner serves a purpose for CNN.com, it drives visitors to its Live video player, and hopefully some will come back to use it in the future. However, they run the risk of “crying wolf” too many times. People will only be fooled by a rerun of an Obama presser so many times, how long before they just tune out the banner altogether?

What do you think about CNN.com’s definition of “live and “developing?” Let me know in the comments.