No Roanoke Times Tuesday morning

No Roanoke Times Tuesday morning

Roanoke Times statement on the delay


One of the reasons blogging/Radio is so important. Paper is still transient. Its there one minute, but can be gone just as easy. As long as you have power, phones - you have news. People can call in reports of whatever, the broadcasters can then read those reports.

Friends call friends to tell them whats going on by them, friends put friends reports on the blog - suddenly you have a variety of sources to choose from for your up-to-the-minute reporting. National Weather Service does it with the Spotters, nothing more than an extended reporting network.

I think thats really where newspapers are running into trouble these days. Newspapers are static - they are a timeslice of events from the time of printing. There is no running reporting, no constant commentary. Don't get me wrong - I love my morning paper, but by 10am Im wondering what else is going on... The websites for most newspapers are still struggling with the static idea. I mean, the printed word has been around what, centuries now. Thats along time to be doing the same thing. It gets encoded into the genetic makeup of the newspaper. This is how its laid out, this is its sections. Until the "digital paper" (not far off, IBM and a few others are finishing up on it) hits the market - there has been no real change in newspapers in decades. Sure with the computer, layout and publishing has gotten easier. No more typesetting challenges, no more image issues.

What would Walt Whitman, Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle so many years ago think of all this. He would probably be amazed at the new technology in the newspaper press itself, but he would still recognize the newspaper. For a good while, in NY - we had 3 papers. 3 papers for the masses, not counting the NY Times. The Daily News and The NY Post - both morning editions, and Newsday - a Long Island based paper which up until 1987(ish) was still an evening edition. I had a paper route as a kid. For a while, I was doing the Daily News in the morning, and Newsday in the evening. Probably 110 papers a day, and my routes didn't overlap.

That was probably the last time in my life before the rise of the Internet as a reporting tool that I can remember getting updated stories, in print, same day. Im not a big TV fan. I'll watch the news off and on at night, but I personally prefer to get local news online - its a cleaner, faster way to get to the stories that interest me. Now I realize that the Roanoke Times, DBJ, SLS - they all do news updates if the stories warrant one. But thats seldom it seems compared to what Ive seen the Blogging community do. For example - go to Rhett's Roanke Firefighters page. He has a story about a fire at Loudon Ave. that I have not seen anywhere else.

This is not the first time either. Just a week ago, he had pictures of an accident on Franklin and Reserve. And prior to that, trumping anyones coverage, he had photos from the scene (maybe 10 feet away) from the big accident on 581 by Valley View.

Its one thing to be a reporter and gain access to a scene, its another to be on-scene and report it later. Theres a fundamental difference in mindset.

Well, I guess I've kicked this horse enough.