Let’s have fun with this. I’ll write down my thoughts about the State of the Union as it happens, but I don’t really see the value in literally live-blogging this sort of thing. Anyway:
First thing’s first. “Assault” is not the right term for this, but only because it carries a specific legal meaning that requires physical contact. But that doesn’t justify waving away the situation I’m about to discuss as no big deal, because it is.
The Escapist has a news post entitled “Female Gamer ‘Sexually Assaulted’ While Playing PS3“. According to the original posting on the Playstation forum, a female player (the poster’s roommate) was harassed by another, male player, who insisted on following her avatar around and crouching behind her, as if staring at her ass. He didn’t stop after being asked to stop or after the female player (and others present) threatened to report him, which she and several others eventually did.
While the Boston Globe dropped the ball with its coverage of the education bill passing through the state House of Representatives, The Somerville Journal picked it up and ran with it. I’m not asking for anything impossible, here, if a local newspaper can pull off what a big, lumbering dinosaur like the Globe apparently finds difficult.
I noticed an article in the Boston Globe, a copy of which was lying in a common area at work, about an education bill that had just passed through the Massachusetts House of Representatives. So I read the whole thing, which was a lot of quotes of people saying that they liked charter schools and descriptions of the marathon length of the midnight session and whatnot.
And then I realised that, having read the article, not once did it mention the number or even title of the bill, nor did it describe in concrete terms what the effects are. The bill apparently increases the number of charter schools the state will permit to exist, but doesn’t specify how many charter schools will be permitted if the bill passes the State Senate. It also “aims to overhaul the state’s worst schools”, but doesn’t say how.
Granted, the article does mention that “members plowed through about 150 amendments to the bill”, which is an interesting piece of information, and maybe does excuse a somewhat sketchily-detailed article. However, that doesn’t excuse the lack of any detail whatsoever. This follow-up, which appears to be a web-only article, and therefore one which won’t get as many views, reveals that the so-called “overhaul” of failing schools is actually just a conversion of those schools into charter schools. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it strikes me as something that’s pretty important when it comes to informing the public’s view of a bill’s effects.
Maybe this is just an indictment of one of the limitations of print journalism. With the pressure on to file a report on a big, breaking story like this in time for the presses to churn out enough copies for the morning edition, details necessarily fall through the cracks. And that’s ignoring situations like the infamous Dewey Defeats Truman headline, where the pressure to make it to press led to the printing of a blatantly counterfactual article before all the details came in.
The increasing prominence of blogging is a double-edged sword in these cases. You don’t face deadline pressure, but then you also have a sense of immediacy that leads to kicking out first impressions that end up becoming a final draft. Tesla knows I’ve fallen prey to that trap, but at least I’m just a lonely little fourth stringer who nobody looks to for advice. I’d be interested to know how many people read blogs via RSS versus going directly to webpages. Either way, though, it seems to me that the “time shift” effect encourages getting the story right over getting the story first, since you can’t count on your audience reading your post before someone else’s, even if you post first.