Charlie's Angles

A lot of normal people don’t “get” the idea of how journalism is evolving. Rather than another attempt at explanation here is a short demonstration of how it really works:
At 9:21 a.m. Tuesday Nov 10, Port Orchard Mayor Lary Coppola posted an election analysis on his personal web log (blog, to you hipsters) that offered a pretty candid assessment of the results. It was newsworthy because he “came clean” about his support of Amy Igloi-Matsuno, stating that he did not actively endorse her during the campaign because he wanted her to win on her own merits. This is more or less what we expected, since it also seemed that Coppola’s support could be a negative for some voters.
I had asked Coppola twice to provide an election quote for the POI’s coverage but he declined, saying that he was going to save his observations for his own blog. I thought he would alert me when it was posted but he neglected to do so. Probably because being mayor leaves him less time to coddle the press. Or maybe he was just testing, to see if I was paying attention.
4:44 p.m. Tuesday Nov 11 Chris Henry of the Kitsap Sun didn’t need any coddling, since she saw Coppola’s blog and posted a story that picked out the most newsworthy bits and fleshed them out with some questions of her own. Actually it wasn’t a story but a blog entry. The Sun doesn’t share its strategy with me, but the move makes sense; providing online content that is more detailed and personal than what is in the printed product. Henry added value with a question about why Coppola endorsed a candidate in one race but stayed neutral in another where he had a strong preference. The answer? Amy was a political neophyte, and therefore needed to stand on her own.
So we have one a news source posting a blog that was picked up and expanded by another blog. The news turned its first cycle, that was accomplished in a paperless, eco-friendly way.
But it gets better. Here, at 9:44 p.m. Tuesday Nov 11 I posted this piece; actually a blog entry about another blog entry that was originally about a third post. Each one of us adds some value, or tries to. (If this were a real post I would add such value here, but it is only a demonstration.)
Additionally, the social networking site Facebook bracketed the proceedings. I first learned of Coppola’s post through a post by a Feline Facebook Friend named Squirte Jackson, who opined that Coppola had eaten a bit too much catnip. And after I finish this entry I will certainly link it to my own Facebook page.
And we are all better off. An interesting story that would usually get buried on page A13 gets passed around from one expert to another, where each adds another perspective. Comments can also provide an added dimension, where a controversial story stimulates a public dialogue at each step. There might be a lot of yelling and screaming along the way, but the end result is that you end up being exposed to many points of view, instead of a cursory account of an incident that is limited to the time allocated for reporting and the space available in that day’s newspaper.
Any questions?