Folks are making a big deal about Tina Brown’s still-in-development news aggegator Web site, Daily Beast. Here’s what Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine writes about Brown and the Beast:
Now she gets to her pitch. Wind up: “People seeking to be informed are becoming increasingly overwhelmed.†Cue the stats about how many blogs and YouTube videos there are. She said that at the Democratic convention, everybody was filming everybody else: “a hall of mirrors.†Now she quotes Nick Davis bemoaning “churnalism.†Methinks she’ll cure.
She says we fear we’re going to miss that special moment of news. She says there’s so much we can’t believe: splogs, flogs, and misinformation. “That’s the part that scares me the most.â€
Tina to the rescue. “What can we do to cut through all this static, fake stuff, and noise…. There’s nothing wrong with algorithms. They’re fantastic…. It is the time for editors to reassert themselves ot curate in a more rigorous way.”
Pardon me for pointing out that Lucianne Goldberg’s Web site, lucianne.com, has been doing exactly that for more than a decade. Lucianne’s editors are very hands-on (just ask anyone who has forgotten to split a long headline) and the LDotters, as the contributors are called, are, collectively, the best wire editor in the nation. Go to lucianne.com a few times a day and you’ll know what’s going on anywhere in the world.
I will be surprised if Daily Beast is any kind of improvement over that.