So for the last 4 years, I have been living in Binghamton, NY, which is where I grew up, but moved away to Rochester for 6 years for college and my first job. While in Rochester, I took to reading the news regularly and found the Democrat and Chronicle there fairly good at having informative and well written articles.
Well, after moving down here, I started Reading the Press and Sun Bulletin, which is the local paper, and have just been really disappointed with their articles. It seems most of them are either regurgitated AP articles, that maybe had a paragraph added to it, or there are so many misspellings that it makes it hard to read. They also would publish the same stories on their website several times over the course of the day, but only adding like 1 sentence to it.
The other thing that I have noticed a lot is that more and more, the articles that are written just give the basics of what happened for maybe a paragraph or two (if we’re lucky) and then 4-5 paragraphs of random people’s thoughts on the subject. This was annoying and isn’t really news. I don’t care what the guy walking into Walmart at 2:33pm on tuesday thought about the Mayor of a town he doesn’t live in’s speech from the day before.
So that to me was bad, but again, whatever, i can deal. So today, I was again reading the news on their website, and I went to read one article on the Jeopardy game with Watson and this is what I found:
On Monday night, IBM artificial intelligence program Watson competed in the first night of a three-night series against Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Below is a mix of Tweets, Facebook statuses, and other links from around the web relating to Watson’s performance, cited from before, during and after the episode aired in the Binghamton, N.Y. area.
Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy! will be aired Tuesday night. On Wednesday, the players will play a full game of Jeopardy! Join @PSBNancy again Tuesday night at 7:30 and use the hashtag #Watson to join the conversation as Watson tries to defeat two of the most successful human Jeopardy! players in the show’s history.
You can follow reporter Nancy Dooling on Twitter at twitter.com/PSBNancy.
That is followed by random twitter and facebook statuses. Really? That’s how you write news articles now? “This happened, here’s what twitter had to say…”
Digging a little further, apparently that is what happens. The article was done using the site http://storify.com/ whose deal is just that:
Create stories
using social media.Turn what people post on social media into compelling stories. Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.
Is this really what news has come to? And if that is the case, do we really need newspapers if all they are doing is collecting twitter/facebook posts to re-send to us?
I can see now why this industry is on such a sharp decline.
