Getting the News: Wheels Within Wheels

The addition of a Courier News microsite on Plainfield gives city news seekers a new portal, but one that echoes existing sources, including numerous online blogs and aggregators. It's a far cry from opening the daily newspaper and settling down with a cup of coffee to turn the pages.

The daddy of aggregators is Dan Damon's CLIPS, whose author says it dates back to the days when he assembled items of interest for council members under the rubric "Clippings." Damon had been the city's public information officer under the administration of the late Mayor Albert T. McWilliams. Damon also publishes a blog, Plainfield Today, in the old muck-raking tradition ("Turning things over with a pointy stick," "The needler in the haystack").

At present, Damon follows the Plainfield blogroll, which has burgeoned to 20 or more posters on varied subjects. He also posts what appear to be Plainfield items gathered by a web crawler, which sometimes results on those originating in out-of-state places named Plainfield.

While CLIPS is valued by many, the frequency of posting by bloggers results in situations such as Saturday's nearly page-long roster, two-thirds of which were stale. Only a handful of bloggers post daily.

Rather than clicking on CLIPS innumerable times every day, this writer prefers to check Saul Qersdyn's aggregation of Plainfield blogs that has a feature where the viewer can roll over the last post and see the date without clicking on it. This sorts out the old news from the new news without giving somebody a bunch of futile page views.

Of course, if you have bookmarked your favorites and know they generally post daily, you have your own virtual blogroll.

The addition of the Plainfield InJersey site does not include news from other legacy print media, as Damon points out, but on the other hand, only the Courier News consistently reports on Plainfield news.

There are still other changes and innovations in news delivery. Sometimes clicking on a newspaper story link yields only a one- or two-sentence teaser. Maybe that's all one needs if checking a Blackberry or other device: "Two shot in Plainfield. More later."

I for one am looking forward to Mark Spivey's new Courier News microsite venture, even though my news reporting on the blog sometimes parallels for free what I might have gotten paid for if still freelancing for the newspaper.

In my opinion, the main factor in evaluating all these news sources is how factual and reliable they are in order to advance the average citizen's understanding of civic events and issues. Empowering the citizens with relevant information is always my goal (with the occasional foray into cat, garden or praying mantis news).

--Bernice