New! New!
Clearly I've gone batty. Between the outrageous bombing missions on TV, I decided it would be a good day to change blogger templates. If it looks rather screwed up, please be kind enough to drop me an e-mail. Thanks.
- posted by Amy @ 3/21/2003 06:05:00 PM

 

What Would Tony Pierce Do?
Tony Pierce is protesting the war as only Tony Pierce can.
- posted by Amy @ 3/20/2003 02:17:00 PM

 

Cautious Continental
Reuters has a roundup of airlines that are canceling flights due to the war. Most are routes into places such as Israel and Kuwait, but Continental Airlines is taking a more aggressive tack:

The fifth biggest U.S. carrier has suspended some transatlantic and transpacific flights. It cut one of two daily round-trip flights from its Newark hub to each of London's Gatwick and Paris's Charles de Gaulle airports.

Continental will fly smaller planes between Newark and both Amsterdam and Rome under changes planned for April 6 to May 1. It will also cut services between Newark and Tokyo's Narita Airport to four times a week from once a day through April 24.

(Thanks to Nick Denton for flagging this useful Reuters page with their latest Iraq news.)
- posted by Amy @ 3/20/2003 01:28:00 PM

 

Hey Kate, Turn it Up
Hi Kate Sullivan readers. If you’ve clicked over here thinking I’ve written something about giant radio station company Clear Channel organizing pro-war rallies, you’d be wrong. Kate’s linking to me because I egged her on yesterday in her own comments section, knowing this story in the Chicago Tribune would get her on a rant.

Hi Who-is-Kate-Sullivan readers. If you don’t know Kate, you should at least read her blog. I worked with Kate in Prague back in the day. Now she does a lot of freelance music biz writing, though I’m a particular fan of her very frank radio business coverage. In her analysis today is this graf:

My problem with deregulation has always been the musical suckitude it engenders. Nelly and Eminem notwithstanding, deregulation makes for terrible bad radio. It's that simple. But there is another serious problem: the control of information by corporations in bed--or at least totally making out on the couch--with the Pentagon. Radio Fun Fact: The head of the FCC, who is pro-deregulation, happens to be Colin Powell's son. I'm sure it warms his cockles to see his buddies at Clear Channel sucking his father's cockadoodle doo with their pro-war demonstrations.

- posted by Amy @ 3/20/2003 12:36:00 PM

 

Online News Ready for War
So how’d the online news companies do with the start of war? Here’s the results of my quickie survey, focusing on the half-hour after Ari Fleischer confirmed the war started and said President Bush would speak at 10:15 p.m. ET.

Most Improved: The New York Times

The New York Times has significantly beefed up its online operations in the past year or two. “Breaking news” used to mean a feed from AP and Reuters somewhere on the front page. Last night, the NYT remade the online front page for the war, using Reuters pictures and stories. But within 45 minutes of the Fleischer announcement, there was a long NYT double-bylined trunk story posted. It even jumped once.

Biggest Disappointment: Google News

Only a few months old, Google has become a hot news aggregator, but is still most useful for its search function as opposed to its front page. As Bush was preparing to speak last night, its front page had yet to mention the explosions over Baghdad, let alone a declaration of war. The front page, put together by computer program rather than a human with news judgment, needs refinement. They’ve come a long way fast and I was hoping they’d have something ready considering the 8 p.m. deadline last night.

Still Kicking Ass Award: CNN.com and MSNBC.com

It’s hard to say who was first with each aspect of the story unless you have several people refreshing their pages simultaneously – but that said, CNN.com and MSNBC.com are still far and away the fastest. They both re-made their front pages the fastest. CNN was the first to switch from wire to its own copy (MSNBC prefers staff and wire.) MSNBC.com sent me two breaking news alerts before I got one from CNN (followed later by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal.) See Update below.

It’s About Time Award: Online News Sites

All the major news company sites I checked quickly had their front-pages re-made to reflect the start of the war. This speed didn’t happen, even as recently as the Columbia explosion. (I did one of these news roundups that morning, too.) As a group, news companies finally understand they must have an online breaking news presence in order to maintain their credibility. Only a few are geared up to do it effectively, but it’s a significant turning point that they are no longer pretending it doesn’t make a difference. But keep it in perspective: TV and the wire services are still best at breaking news.

Conflict of interest disclaimer: I formerly worked for ABCNews.com and Reuters, and my husband still works for Reuters.

What I left out disclaimer: I didn’t include AP in this because there’s no good way to read AP stories directly online. For the past few years, I’ve used Yahoo! but recently, I’ve found Yahoo!’s news to be weird with some breaking news and thus unreliable for comparison. Reuters.com would have been my runner-up for most improved since the wire service previously treated their .com as something of an orphan site (then again, whose news dot-com wasn’t) and you could find a Reuters story more easily by going through Yahoo!, Google, or just about any major newspaper’s search engine. Last night, they had some good stuff up fast – though inexplicably around 10 p.m. all their new stuff disappeared and the page reverted to lead stories from hours earlier – from before the bombing started. The glitch stayed up for several minutes.

I'm not paid to do this disclaimer: The survey above is of course non-scientific and leaves out a bunch of sites that are important (BBC, CBS, FOX, etc.) but I didn't check last night. I was much more comprehensive when I did a similar story for the Online Journalism Review after Sept. 11. (Though their date on the story now reflects their database conversion as opposed to the story's run date.)

UPDATE: Matt Welch linked to this post and his comment section elicited input from Gary Farber of Amygdala who says ABCNews.com was way ahead of CNN.com. ABC was one of the pages I left out (see “I’m not paid to do this disclaimer” above) because their story lacked a credit – and since there was no easy way to figure out if it was from the wires or their own staff, I stuck with the pages that were clear about where their stuff was coming from. And when I’ve done these roundups in the past, ABC very frequently used wire on breaking news, so I didn’t give them the benefit of the doubt last night. (I don’t mean to dismiss the whole site - I still have good, smart friends working there.)
- posted by Amy @ 3/20/2003 10:55:00 AM

 

If it’s Orange, it Must be War
Around noon today, a bunch of helicopters started passing over my apartment building heading for Manhattan. Then a few minutes later, another group. And another. The ones I could see were flying in formations of 10 and there were about a dozen groups that passed during the next hour. That’s a lot of helicopters, even if you don’t like math.

Everyone on the street stopped and watched. Every time. I don’t think I’ve seen that since that day a year ago when there was that explosion in Chelsea and everyone thought it was another attack.
- posted by Amy @ 3/18/2003 03:09:00 PM

 

When Jersey City Blogs
My friend Jim Lowney has started a blog – though I think it’s still suffering from a St. Patrick’s Day hangover. He’s a great photographer, though if you hired him to shoot your wedding, you might get some reality shots like this.
- posted by Amy @ 3/18/2003 02:43:00 PM

 

Miami Gone Wild
Well hello – just got back from a trip to Miami and apparently I’ve brought the beautiful weather back to New York with me. There are actually still ice slicks on some of the sidewalks on my block – left over from the last snow. It was actually 69 degrees here yesterday. Nice.


Miami South Beach has a way of making you feel old. You go to the beach there and everyone is either 18 or 80. And unless you’re under say 23 or so, I think you automatically get filed in the old-people category.


Who did the kiddies want to hang with? Girls Gone Wild. MTV and the Playboy.com model search were both vying for the kids' attentions and apparently losing. Even lots of sober girls were hanging around the Girls Gone Wild guys. What's with that? One of my girlfreinds said maybe the girls think of it as a stepping-stone to something more glamorous like Survivor, Jerry Springer or the Bachelor.


Another unpleasant thing I learned on vacation is that my switch to Time Warner’s Roadrunner service leaves you SOL on the road. I did sign up for my away team account before I left home (apparently they will start charging for it soon) and loaded up the necessary software. It reminded me of using AOL around 1993 – busy signals, software that makes you re-enter the phone number each time, never knowing if there are additional surcharges to the call. And slow. Did I mention slow? It's why-even-bother slow.


But the worst lesson – and you’d think I’d know by know – is that once you get off the plane, you should not have eight mojitos in rapid succession and not expect to pay the piper.


The Miami Herald still chokes, but they have a pretty good metro columnist, Jim DeFede, who is very refreshing in that he does his own reporting, clarifies his opinion and doesn’t try to overstate the facts or imply anything more from it than what he's logically supported.


The coolest thing of the week, though, was sitting on the beach Friday around noon and a fast-moving dark cloud drops a rain drop. I immediately grab my shorts and slip my Walkman into my bag. In those few seconds the heavens have opened up. I start running from the beach in my unfastened shoes and only get glimses of the thousands of Spring Breakers on my heels -- all running full speed across the sand and toward Ocean Avenue. A mile or so of beach totally emptied in a matter of seconds.

- posted by Amy @ 3/18/2003 02:29:00 PM