There are always a few pieces that seem to exist only on the fringes of the news cycle, so here's a few we came across today that might pique your interest:
As the news cycle moves faster than ever and stories must be produced at an almost superhuman speed, search engines like Google and Lexis-Nexis have become invaluable for reporters and anyone else interested in sifting through a lot of information in a short amount of time. As one who has traversed the road of Nexis more often than I'd like to remember, I was particularly interested when Edward Tenner asked in Sunday's New York Times if today's search engines are making us, well, dumber. Can an expert Googler distinguish a legitimate source from a lesser one? "Despite constant tweaking, [search engines'] formulas display irrelevant or mediocre sites on a par with truly expert ones," writes Tenner. And librarians aren't too thrilled either: "As another university librarian, Pamela Martin, observed, 'Google's simplicity and impressive search prowess trick students into thinking they are good all-around searchers, and when they fail in library searches, they are ashamed as well as confused.'"
We've given you a glimpse of White House pool report humor before, but in this weekend's Lowell Sun (thanks, Romenesko) Evan Lehmann provides a little more background on the often amusing dispatches:The newspaper reporter writes the official "pool report," which is blasted out via e-mail to every news bureau in Washington. Read by hundreds of reporters, who are free to use the information in their stories, pool reports are often bursting with creative phrases and colorful descriptions. Many times they highlight details that would never make a news story.
One pool report, for example, noted the presence of Bush's daughter Barbara and that she was wearing "tight jeans."
The report, written by Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder Inc., went on to note that White House aides Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett "were not wearing tight jeans."
While Cox News' Ken Herman tells Lehmann that the first role of the pool reporter is to get the facts, "there is no shortage of humor" after that. We'll keep you posted if we catch a good one.Speaking of information sifting, check out an interesting piece from the Charlotte Observer. Examining lottery data, reporters Jim Morrill and Adam Bell discovered that low income people in North Carolina are more than twice as likely as wealthier residents to live near a lottery ticket outlet. Among their other findings, in South Carolina, "People earning less than $30,000 a year spent an estimated $627 per household annually over the past four years [on lottery tickets,] nearly triple the spending of those making more than $50,000."