Trading Nude Photos Via Mobile Phone Now Part of Teen Dating, Experts Say [Telecom]

... or any news outlet. Although this comment might be more appropriate in Risks than Telecom, media outlets are increasingly cutting costs by publishing stories from newswire services rather than their own reporting network, rarely if ever confirming the story firsthand. Thus, stories which are either sensational or which play into our fears are often accepted, distributed, and published unchallenged. As soon as I saw this article and your comment, I thought of the "toothing" (at least that's somewhat telecom related) hoax, which IIRC was picked up by a number of mainstream media outlets.

The recency illusion strikes again!

The Associated Press was founded some 160 years ago for precisely this purpose. It's hardly a new thing.

(Cue the discussion of how "wire" services came to be so important in the development of telecommunications infrastructure around the world from about 1850 to about 1970.)

-GAWollman

Point taken. But the recent issue is that stories no longer originate with newswires(written, in theory, by traditional journalists working for a reputable member organization and supervised by an editor), they're often taken from non-traditional sources without the appropriate confirmation. And, as if the internet hasn't already done much to level the playing field between mainstream media and the kind of rigorously investigated content that was previously only available in the form of discarded leaflets in the gutter, I seem to notice more and more grammatical and spelling errors in my local papers, leading me to suspect that mainstream media is cutting back on editors to reduce costs further.

Unfortunately this is the trend.

One challenge is that people used to use transit to get to work and would read the paper while riding; the trend has continued toward the car where you can't read (at least not safely).

People only have so much time to read, and the Internet, cable TV, and other modern sources and lifestyles cut into time previously spent on print media or traditional network news. They thus cut corners which discourages more readers.

Cable news outlets, IMHO, stink. They have a ton of airtime to fill but nothing of substance to fill it with.

This thread has veered a bit too far away from telecom, so this will be the last post.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)

Gee, you mean spell checkers can't take the place of editors?

There was an article in my home town paper once, back when they had a sports writer, about a certain baseball team that had been "perineal winners" until there was a change in management.

But to bring this back to the telecom subject...it was one Bennett who owned a New York newspaper and convinced the other NY newspaper owners that they would have to associate in news gathering or they would compete themselves to death. Much later Bennett's son had taken over the paper. There is a very amusing passage about the younger Bennett in a nice book, "The telegraph : a history of Morse's invention and its predecessors in the United States" by Lewis Coe. It all relates to Mackay and the formation of Postal Telegraph Co. and Jay Gould who once controlled Western Union.

I don't know Coe's background, but his book is a nice complement to George Oslin's "The story of telecommunications" as the latter is told from a Western Union point of view, while Coe writes more from a Postal Telegraph point of view.

It's a nice day, and I'm a nice guy, but this is the _last_ post in this thread.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)