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Observations





Let me make a slight observation on the journalistic side of the Net.  A
lot of the publications I've been reading lately surrounding the death of
Princess Diana have made the comment "After all, she's no Mother Teresa"
or "I would hate to see what the media will do when Mother Teresa dies"

Well, not to sound disrespectful or cynical, but now we have that chance,
and in my web surfing of the last 10 minutes, I have only found one site
offering dominant coverage - CNN.  WRAL has it up, but it's at the bottom
of the page under national stories (where, if you're like me and don't
normally scroll down past what you get in your browser, then you wouldn't
know it), and the Washington Post hasn't even put it up yet.  Neither has
the N&O, NANDO has it up, but the predominant story is still the Queen's
address regarding DIana.  TIme got their coverage up at 2:08p, bu it's
dwarfed on the Pathfinder page by a special on Di, and of course, Yahoo
has another link - Mother Teresa Dies.

Many of these media outlets want their on-line divisions to be seen as
legitimate journalistic endeavors, yet in a world where it takes one
person to get the info together and put a story out on the web, but a crew
of up to 10 to get a story out over the air (not counting all the hassle
of preempting coverage), organizations are still getting the 45 sec
newsbrief out on the air before getting it on the Web, where, during a
business day, more people are tuned in anyway.  IMHO, this is not the way
to develop public confidence in journalism on the Web.

If anyone is on line and has time to poke around in a few chat rooms to
see what's being said, I'd be interested in knowing whether people are
discussing Mother Teresa's death as much.

In rereading this, I suppose it would be better posted to a journalism
discussion group, but as I have no other outlet for my queries, I'll post
here instead and buzz off to work.

Steph


steph@unc.edu				http://blake.oit.unc.edu/~steph/




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