“I realized I was probably getting a better report than anyone watching television in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I’d rolled my own news. It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest component was my own tinkering to create my own news “product” — a compilation of the best material I could find. It was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do next year and in future races, but it worked.”
Category Archives: Journalism
The wire service of tomorrow?
The Associated Press has unveiled more details of the forthcoming shift to eAP, the Electronic Associated Press, a new initiative to make AP a more interactive network of multimedia content. [CyberJournalist]
Google’s new News Alerts.
Google has invented another great tool: Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. Email news alerts aren’t new but what makes Google’s so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day — and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you’re writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words “gay and bishop.”
All the news, all the time.
According to CyberJournalist, Google News beat out BBC News Online, MSNBC.com, Poynter’s Romenesko and allAfrica.com to win 2003 Webby Award for best news site. I’d sure like to be a fly on the wall at AP headquarters. I spent a few (pre-Web) years trying to develop and market an “alternative (to AP) wire service.” All of the news and information was “out there.” And there was no shortage of radio stations (our target market) hungry for the information. The challenge was connecting all the dots. We had a big old expensive satellite channel to move the information one way and we busted our hump to “aggragate” (I always liked that word) the information. But people just didn’t want to pay for information. At least, not very much. Fast forward a few years and damned near every newspaper in the world is putting some or all of their stuff online.
The big record labels tell me that although I paid for my copy of the Metallica CD, I can’t rip the songs to a CD and give it to a friend. While they might win this one, keeping me from sending a copy of today’s big news story to five friends (who each send it to five friends).
I always thought the most important part of the Associated Press wasn’t it’s reporters and editors but the “connectedness” of all those newspapers. A way for them to share the news they gathered. Can we agree that has changed forever?
Cursor-cursed funeral parlors.
“Today’s sorry newsrooms–silent, smokeless, boozeless, cursor-cursed funeral parlors–bear no resemblance to the divine hell-holes that persisted at newspapers and wire services until the mid-1970s. They were seas of grunge and debris…a universe of controlled chaos, suspended in a perpetual stinking fog of cigarette smoke and worse.”
— Diana McLellan, journalist, former gossip columnist, and longtime Washington editor of Washingtonian magazine
Andrew Sullivan on blogging
“The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don’t have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don’t have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want.”
— Andrew Sullivan in Slate