For most of history news was information about something that happened a while ago. Just how long that "while" was in any given situation depended a great deal on the technology of the day.
There were two key limitations on how fast the news could get from wherever an event had happened to the mind of someone like you or me. The first limitation was transmission.
The marathon race is named for the feat of a soldier who ran the twenty-five miles or so from Marathon to Athens carrying news of the Athenian victory over the Persians. The speed of the news depended on the speed of the runner.
In fact, until the 19th Century the speed of news was determined by the speed of the courier. That's why the news of Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans took so long to reach Washington DC.
Things changed when Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph. Suddenly news could get from the place of origin to the place of consumption far faster than any human being. Great news services, like Reuters were founded because the telegraph made them possible, though Paul Reuter hedged his bets by using pigeons as well. The definition of news became "information about something that just happened."
Even when news could be transmitted almost instantly it was still limited by the need to be processed into a form suitable for consumption. When there were only newspapers in the news world, that pretty much meant how quickly type could be set and a newspaper printed and distributed.
Most of the time that meant that news consumption followed the schedule of regular newspaper production-morning and evening for dailies. If the news was really big, the paper would put out an Extra edition and send newsboys out into the streets to hawk it.
Speed from receipt to consumption changed with radio. With the phrase, "This just in …" a radio station could share news about an event while the newspaper down the block was still casting type for an extra edition. Radio could even broadcast the news right from the spot where it was happening.
As television took over the entertainment role that radio had played, some radio stations started to use an all news format. In 1980 television followed suit.
That was the year that Ted Turner founded the Cable News Network. By doing that, he changed the idea of news to "information about something that's happening right now." As technology has made reporters better able to report live from where news is happening, it's become something we've come to expect.
The result, today, is that you can pretty much expect that television news will pick up on every important (and many unimportant but interesting) stories almost as soon as they happen. The problem for most of us is getting notice about stories that matter to us and finding out more than the television news folks have time to tell us.
The good news is that there are some great Digital Age tools that will alert you whenever news that's important to you happens. Other tools will help you find out lots of information about stories you're interested in.
Depending on your field of interest, there are all kinds of alert services available. Check the Web sites for investment services you use, newspapers you read, and other news sources to see what kinds of alerts they offer. Many of those alerts can be sent directly to your digital pager, Palm device or wireless phone.
Be careful, though, to make sure you get alerts only on the things that really matter. Alerts interrupt you and you don't want to be interrupted too often.
I think everyone in business should subscribe to at least one news alert service. My service of choice is the one run by the New York Times. It gives me ten choices for topics to track and alerts me by email when stories that meet my criteria are posted to the New York Times site.
Using this service I wind up with a list of important headlines in different sections of the paper, along with a couple of lines describing each story. The price is reasonable, about $20 per year.
When you want to know more about an event or issue, I suggest a visit to key newspaper sites. For me they've replaced the physical paper for in-depth coverage. Most newspaper sites have the full content of the physical paper online, but usually they also have more material that's relevant but won't fit in the paper. The CNN site is also a good place to go for more in-depth information than their newscasts can offer.
Here's one more recommendation. Google has been testing their Google news site for a while and it works great. That site offers you links to coverage of a news event by many different news agencies including the Web sites of newspapers and radio and television stations.
The world may be moving faster and faster these days, but the Web offers you some great tools for keeping up with it.
Some Resource Pointers
For more about the history of news and how it's delivered today, check out the Web site for the Newseum, the Interactive Museum of news.
Lightning Man : The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse by Kenneth Silverman is a new biography of Morse that's gotten good reviews. There's a lot more to Morse than the telegraph and this book tells the story well.
You might want to read the Morse biography and Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist by Albert E. Moyer at the same time. It was Henry's research that enabled Morse to invent his telegraph, though he has gotten scant popular credit. He was also the first head of the Smithsonian Institution and helped organize the Weather Bureau.
Me and Ted Against the World : The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN by Reese Schonfeld is a great read about how the Cable News Network came to be.
For a bit of perspective I suggest Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones by Peter Arnett. This is the biography of one of the premier correspondents of the Twentieth Century, who started out filing his dispatches using a Morse key. Read it and you'll get a good story and some perspective on the whole news business.
10 November 2003
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