QUESTION: Do Irish breaking news services [online] alter the timestamps of news stories without renewing the content of a story?
ANSWER : Yes
this is really annoying, it servers to dilute the importance of breaking news just like Sky News / BBC 24 and CNN do. Flashing breaking news every 15/20 minutes is aggressive, but altering the update time of a story that has not been updated [online] is dishonest. Surely there is better was to rank order than fake timestamps. There is a better way but news agenda is about being first to scoop not first to be right. If this was really the case then breaking news services with the oldest timestamps would have claim to being first, but its also about looking freshest even if you are not.
my favourite breaking news services in Ireland
1. Aertel Teletext not via http://www.rte.ie/aertel/
2. http://www.breakingnews.ie :fast regular and free
3. http://www.rte.ie :the AV links make up for poor text coverage
4. http://www.ireland.com :[better out of hours]
I do more news page lookups on Teletext than I do online perday, and I must be online 9+ hours a day. I could also live without the video, sound & text is luxury to me, apart from the big once a year events, News; need not have video, often it has ‘piece to camera’ crap or live link to sites, not because their is news there but the daily planners put a SNG truck there and rented the feed, but the story flew south hours before the fixed time news broadcast came on air at evening primetime.
Watch video news enter the mobile market; watch match box size anchor tell you nothing new today; watch them degrade our filters with abuse of BREAKING NEWS straps for “cat farting by fire place” stories.
This madness has to end – it starts with you, learn how to filter this noise, increase the S:N:R, read more, seek out more long form journalism, seek out more versions of the spin, even ones you would not generally be disposed to. seek out news from original source, shortwave radio is still doing it. read blogs; listen to podcasts;
Don’t let big business interest kill your news flow. do get bombarded with data smog. filter & learn.