July 19, 2009

Media in the 21st Century: Beat Sharing, Illustrated

Once upon a time, in a more enlightened era, great journals competed to bring readers exclusive stories of the day. They were locked in a struggle, perpetually trying to "scoop" each other, to find news before their nemeses even knew anything was happening.

Not anymore! Now, the papers have fired virtually all their reporters, holding on to a few recent grads interns who never heard of The Front Page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Front_Page or saw His Girl Friday,( but did see the incredibly bad re-make with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner that co-starred Superman(, and practice "beat sharing," where instead of each paper covering all the "beats," they each cover their own neighborhoods and pass the stories back and forth, kind of like you did with homework in 5th grade.

Here, we see the Miami Herald sharing the day's news with the Sun-Sentinel....
It's on their website and in your Sunday paper as we speak. As you can imagine, they save a lot of money doing this!

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