In the coming days, if we haven’t already, we’re going to hear just about every witty balloon-related remark we can possibly imagine thanks to the Balloon Boy and his attention-whoring folks in Colorado. We’re going to hear about Balloon Dad’s inflated personality, and how his desire to be a reality TV legend stretched its very being before it burst in his face. We’ll learn how much hot air he and his wife were full of, and how they twisted and turned and shaped their kids into their own little balloon puppets.

And eventually, the story of Balloon Boy and the Balloon Family will float off into the clouds and quietly deflate, before we revisit the story again in a few years when the boy is older and filing for a divorce from his parents, and he wants to speak out about his circus act childhood on “60 Minutes.”

Oh, Balloon Boy. How you turned a quiet Thursday afternoon into a media frenzy unlike any other. And for what it’s worth, I commend you for that.

Yes, that’s right. I commend the Heene family. What we saw last week – and I say “we” as collective media personnel, and not the “we” who simply tuned into any news network and watched what we all thought was a 6-year-old boy sail away into the mile-high horizon – tested the athleticism of our news organizations that strive to finish first in the global marathon for information dissemination. 

Here’s a story that nobody knew anything about whatsoever. A story about a family that we’d never heard of, save for Wife Swap groupies. We had nothing to go on, but this video of a boy in a balloon, gliding hopelessly through the air to what many silently assumed was to be a tragic ending unlike any other.

Perhaps, for Richard Heene, the ending was tragic. For the rest of us, I’d say it was just an ending unlike any other. Who’s ever seen anything like this before? It was truly a test of the instant gratification demands that our followers, viewers, users, and fans ask of us as their sources for up-to-the-second news updates.

Look at how this story grasped our newsrooms, took over conversation on our digital media feeds, and drove traffic to our Web sites. For WCBSTV.com, most of our national stories are spearheaded by a national division that allows us to spend our day focusing on the local beat. But this story, I knew this story would be worth far more if I treated it like a local story and took the steering wheel instead. I knew from reading the bazillion Tweets on Twitter, from watching my friends on Facebook update their statuses as we updated them with information, from the simple fact that I, as an often unmoved and desensitized news editor, was crazy captivated by this story, that it would move the ticker if I made it the main course on our menu that afternoon. I could have sat there and let our national team take care of it all, but I wanted to take part in this marathon.

And I’m certainly glad I did. On an otherwise slow news day, our traffic soared as I updated our own story with every bit of information I could find. Our live video views jumped exponentially as I tweeted and retweeted about our live streaming, just throwing bits and pieces of new information I’d found along the way. That’s all anyone wanted that afternoon. Information. Nobody knew anything, so they’d take what they could get. And when we offered it, they ate it.

I knew if I sat there and just waited for a resolution, our users would look elsewhere for the latest bits of information. It was important to keep that timestamp on our story updated as often as possible, without doing a disservice to our users as journalists.

Sure, I probably could have taken advantage of a vulnerable mass audience and embellished for a bigger payout, sorta the way Richard Heene did. If I were a gossip rag site, I probably would have. But instead, I participated in the news marathon and joined along for the sprint. It was definitely worth the run.

On September 11, I blogged about how I wondered if media coverage would have been different today for a similar event because of our ability to communicate faster than ever before nowadays. Balloon Boy, in a way, tested that question of mine. Of course, this was nothing remotely close to a 9/11 type story, and I certainly have no interest in drawing a comparison to one of the worst moments in our nation’s history; but here’s a story that came out of no where to grab the eyes, ears, and keyboards of so many. We all jumped to our TVs, computers, and cell phones to talk with one another and share in this story. This stupid little story.  In a matter of minutes, a mass audience knew about a story that bore no impact on their lives. Millions watched an empty UFO balloon sway through the clouds for hours.

But because of the incredible ability we – the collective media “we” – have to gather and then tell a story today in a matter of seconds, it turned into one of the biggest media blitzes I’ve ever seen. It tested our athleticism and we passed with flying colors. And for that, for what it’s worth, I thank you, Balloon Boy.