A victory for newspapers
How did Gina Smith of The State newspaper know to show up at the Atlanta airport at 6:15 a.m. yesterday to meet Mark Sanford as he walked off an airplane arriving from Buenos Aires?
This tip from an airline passenger on Sanford's aircraft: “We’ve seen your governor on an airplane. He’s not on the Appalachian Trail.” According to the New York Times, the tipster mentioned that Sanford would be returning from Argentina.
Aha! A fellow passenger turned him in — possibly while the airplane was still at the gate in Buenos Aires, given that there was no WiFi on the flight itself.
The type of person who sends out Internet messages while an airplane is preparing for departure but still at the gate, it seems to me, would be more likely than the average person to get news from blogs.
And yet this tipster sent the message to a newspaper, not a blog.
Score one for the legacy news industry!
7 comments:
The "legacy" news industry? Ouch. On the other hand, how many blogs are there with the resources to dispatch a reporter to meet Sanford at the airport, the way The State did?
While Gina Smith drove to Atlanta, her colleague at The State stood watch at the governor's car, which was parked at the airport in Columbia, S.C.
Very few, if any, independent blogs are staffed for stakeout projects such as that one.
That's exactly my point.
on the other hand a large network (think worldwide) of
unemployed bloggers could smother sanford with coverage/stakeouts from buenos aires to columbia,sc
Sure, but that isn't sustainable unless blogs start paying real money. A team of unemployed people could help with the stakeout for awhile, but eventually they need a paying job. Huffington Post has 61 full-time paid employees, but that is more the exception.
It takes at least 60 people to link to actual articles. That doesn't come free, you know.
Large networks of unemployed often don't adhere to journalistic standards of ethics and accuracy, either (though I suppose the same could be said for the Huffington Post).
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