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Saturday, January 12, 2008

Staying in touch


Remember back to the days when communication from viewers to anchors/reporters meant typing out an actual letter, mailing it to the network and then waiting for it to crawl through the system? Those days are long gone, and while we haven't advanced to precisely instant communication, we certainly do have dialogue.

CNN has stayed at the forefront of the new technology by encouraging viewer participation through the incredible iReport system, which they have been utilizing for just over a year now. With seemingly everyone carrying camera phones these days, setting up an easy system for people to send in photos and videos has opened up so many stories to first-hand views that were never before possible.

Additionally, CNN has a wide array of blogs and obviously encourage their reporters and staff to communicate with us through them. With many of them, we also get a fantastic behind-the-scenes view of what is happening. If you haven't yet checked them out, here are some links to a few of the most popular ones:

Of course, most people know about the AC360 blog.
It has been truly ramped up of late, with the "Morning Buzz" post that highlights stories they are working on. Many of the regular contributors post info on breaking stories, while the producers and other staff give us a glimpse of what we don't see onscreen.


The Situation Room does not have a show blog, but they utilize
The Political Ticker for the latest campaign news. Also, CNN's resident curmudgeon and voice of reason Jack Cafferty has his own blog for when you just have to weigh in on the insanities of the day.

To keep up with what is happening in the Middle East, check out the companion blog to CNN International anchor Hala Gorani's show, Inside the Middle East.

And for a behind-the-scenes look at reporters all over the globe, you want to bookmark the In The Field blog. I love this one because it lets the reporters talk about all the interesting things they go through when working on a story. They make it look so easy, but it almost never is!

There are many more blogs to investigate on the main CNN Blog page, and of course all the blogs have RSS notification capability. If you want to stay in the know, CNN is making it easier than ever.

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While we're talking about communication, I have a mini-rant to get off my chest...

I love the crawl, I really do. But there is one thing I wish they would stop doing -- when something happens to a person, they post it in this order: Name, bio material that takes about a minute to crawl across the screen, what happened. 

I can't tell you how many times I have just held my breath waiting to find out what happened to someone... especially since all too often what happened is that they died! But it might be that they had a child, got married, slipped and broke their arm, got an award, etc. 

Please, CNN Powers-That-Be, can't you place the EVENT info before the bio info? Don't leave us hanging, it's bad for our hearts! 

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Where in the World...?

Another big political week on CNN saw most of the "usual suspects" heading for New Hampshire to cover the Tuesday primary. Late Edition had input from Suzanne Malveaux in Nashua, John King in Portsmouth, and Dana Bash in Salem. John and Dana later headed for Manchester to host and give commentary for the re-airing of the ABC debate. Monday, John Roberts and Kiran Chetry hosted American Morning from Concord, joined by Candy Crowley

Also on Monday, Zain Verjee began a week of reporting from Nairobi, Kenya; Susan Roesgen was in Fernley, Nevada to report on the massive flooding there following a levee break, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta appeared on Larry King Live from Sarasota, Florida.

Tuesday, John King was part of The Situation Room's coverage of the primary; TSR aired out of the special election HQ in NY, and the coverage of the voting went on throughout the evening, as we saw for Iowa. Elsewhere, Nic Robinson (above) reported from London for Your World Today.

On Wednesday, American Morning started an hour early, with the hosts back in the New York studio. Back on the campaign trail, John King went to Grand Rapids, Michigan; Dana Bash to Greenville, South Carolina; and Suzanne Malveaux to Jersey City, New Jersey.

Thursday, John King and Dana Bash were in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for the Republican debate and remained there through Friday. Randi Kaye spent those days investigating the missing/murdered Marine at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. And Arwa Damon (below) is back in the Baghdad bureau, where unusually cold weather saw an extremely rare snowfall in that city. (Go ahead and say it: hell froze over this week...)


That's it for me today, enjoy the rest of your weekend! CNN is presenting another Ballot Bowl this weekend, if you want to hear any of the candidates as they work for more support.


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2 comments:

Quitty said...

I can't tell you how many times I have just held my breath waiting to find out what happened to someone

I hate that too. My local channel does the same thing with tornado warnings. I want to know whether I need to go to my safe room so I want to know where the tornado was spotted and I have to wait for "A tornado warning has been issued for the following locations: Apple County. At 12:00AM, dopplar weather radar indicated a possible tornado heading northeast at 30MPH located 2 miles southwest of Dodge City." It is a really slow crawl so by the time they tell me Dodge City it is already in the next county. So, needless to say I go to my safe room a lot.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info about all of the CNN blogs.