A Wealth of Information Online (New York Times Ignores FR, As Usual)

The New York Times ^ | February 2, 2003 | John Schwartz

[Timesink]

February 2, 2003

A Wealth of Information Online

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

nce again, the Internet has proved to be an invaluable news source in time of disaster. But yesterday's events showed something else about the power of the Net.

Not only does it give people access to the news and to one another but it also gives them vast amounts of information and the ability to synthesize and disseminate it.

That was nowhere more clear than on the high-tech community known as Slashdot, at www.slashdot.org, where members posted more than 1,100 messages by 5 p.m. that included links to NASA pages, first-person accounts of hearing or seeing the breakup, the text of Ronald Reagan's 1986 elegy to the Challenger astronauts, arguments over the future of space travel, and the usual exchanges of insults that crop up in any online discussion.

Within hours of the disaster, a technology consultant, Don Drake, had gone to the radar Web site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, downloaded images of the orange debris trail across East Texas and combined them into an animated image, moving every few seconds at www.dondrake.com /archives/000112.html.

A message from Mr. Drake appeared on a respected online news source, David J. Farber's list, at www.interesting-people.org /archives/interesting-people.

"There was no way to do it not that many years ago," Mr. Farber said in a telephone interview. And speaking of the radar images provided by Mr. Drake, he added:

"It turns out it's not something that the conventional media does very well. It does not have the variety of technical talent that pulls it all together. The online world is like having, to use the vocabulary of journalism, "thousands of stringers out there."

One person who learned about the shuttle disaster from Mr. Farber's list is Mike Godwin, senior technology counsel with Public Knowledge, a high-tech policy and advocacy group in Washington.

"Reading through the postings in order, you could see the story develop," Mr. Godwin said in an exchange of instant messages. "As has been the case for most news stories in the last few years, I learn about them first on the Net."

[Timesink]

Ooooh, Slashdot had 1100 messages by 5 pm! What is that, one fifth or one sixth of the posts we had? And /. sure didn't BREAK the story, as we did eleven whole minutes ahead of the Associated Press.

[proxy_user]

This means 1100 messages in one thread. FR seldom tops 100. But they have many fewer threads.

[SteveH]

This thread?

It started at 9:45AM EST...

[SteveH]

... respected online news source ...

This might explain the lack of mention of FR from the NYT. Can't get no respect...

[rwfok]

The main thread on FR hit post 1,100 at 10:15 am. At 5:00 pm, the thread was well over 2,300 and that was just the main thread. I suspect that Saturday's posts concerning the shuttle reached close to 4,000-5,000 , but that's just a guess. All times are C.S.T.

[Timesink]

Yeah, that's the one. But our first thread started at 8:38 AM EST, with the realization that things were not a-ok coming ~8:57.

[L.N. Smithee]

The only time the NYT couldn't avoid FR is when it posted a Nielsen net survey that listed the "stickiest" sites on the web. FR topped them all. They couldn't refer to us an "an internet site" or "a right-wing forum" or whatever.

[SteveH]

Yes, that was my tentative point.

So this shows that the NYT does not really report the news by any objective criteria, just a politically biased mask of selected facts related to the news. (As if one did not already know.)