Local To Go Global? The Critical Weakness In MSM’s Future

We’ve witnessed two very dramatic incidents in the last two days in the news in Miami and Chicago. Apart from the fact both incidents involve planes, what else do the events have in common? Here are the clues:

• USA Today On The Miami Airport ‘Bomb’ Drama:
  • "It was quite scary," Gardner told WTVJ-TV in Miami. "They wouldn’t let you move."

• BBC News On The Chicago Plane Skid:
  • "It got really bumpy, and then a big crashing sound," passenger Katie Duda told local TV station WMAQ.

National news getting their news from local news.

Since the invention of ‘news’, someone else’s local news has been old news by the time it reached you – even in this age of the web. So for one moment, imagine that we had access to all the local content from local TV and radio stations (and blogs) through technology like RSS, and this content was organised in some way like del-cio.us-style tagging, Technorati-style weighting and the way Wired’s Chris Anderson reads the press – not through news editors but filtered by the blogosphere.

Why would we need news networks then?

Hmmm. I wonder what would happen if someone ever tried to put together such a thing – say, like Craig Newmark in his new venture. That would kill news gathering in the same way as, say, Craigslist killed classifieds, no?