Like many people, journalists have a lot to do over the holiday season; they’ve got to plan trips, buy gifts, make appearances at office parties, set up the Christmas tree or the menorah. So it’s no surprise they’re dusting off some old classics, like Black Friday: stories about customers breaking down doors to get a few early discounts, getting into fistfights over the hot toy of the season, and generally displaying a rabidly high level of consumer exuberance. (And this is after Black Friday has been overtaken by the last Sunday before Christmas as the biggest shopping day of the year!)

Still, even if you’ve heard almost all of it before, there are a few twists on the story this year that are interesting.

It seems to me that this year, regular consumers are more aware of the industry strategies and jargon than they used to be. “Black Friday” has been current in the press for some time, but I don’t recall hearing about “doorbusters” (the heavily-discounted merchandise retailers use to lure shoppers in) in the regular press or in ads before. This year, these terms are all over the place. I was startled to hear “doorbuster” in a TV ad. Customers are apparently getting more sophisticated about how these things work, and it may be in part because of the comprehensive catalogs of discount merchandise available online.

Also, I’ve noticed that online retailers are being treated much the same as offline establishments now. They expect “doorbusters” from Amazon and Apple as well as from Target and Wal-Mart. Often, though, they’ve been disappointed. Some of the problems are chronicled on this dealnews post, including bizarrely unanticipated traffic to a large XBox discount crashing amazon.com and several sites scheduling maintenance for Black Friday. Apple offered discounts on a wide range of merchandise, but I was disappointed to find that none of them were significant enough to match the prices on Apple’s usually-superb refurbished hardware. In any case, there was a lot of anticipation among journalists for the online equivalent of customers stampeding each other for $30 DVD players, but I saw little in the way of followup.

It seems to me that retailers are cannily using reporters’ laziness to get their own sales in for a bit of free coverage, while consumers are using the Web to comparison-shop the frenzy in advance. Left holding the bag: the press, which gets a few frenzied photographs a few hours earlier, and a little speculation about what we’re doing in our jammies on “cyber Monday.”