news – Andrew Careaga

A week without news

What happened when I decided to heavily curtail my media consumption

I’d gotten sick and tired of the news — and even more weary of the distortions and reverberations of news and pseudo-news that skittered around the social media universe like ripples from a thousand stones thrown simultaneously into a sludgy pond. Stories and rumors of Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, the backlash to Taylor Swift’s announced support for Kamala Harris, the hate and vitriol spewing forth on cable news and X, which Elon Musk, despite his supposed commitment to making the platform a space for free speech, has turned into a raging hate machine — all of it was taking its toll on my soul and psyche.

So I decided to heavily curtail my consumption of news and news-related information. I could go without news for a week, I thought to myself. It wouldn’t be easy for an info-junkie like me, but I would do my best.

Silobreaker: a new PR analytics tool

I’ve been playing around a bit with a new analytics tool (and news source) called Silobreaker. It’s an online search service that provides contextual search results in a graphical format. Below is an example of one tool, a network map that allows you to see contextual links between your search term and other relevant data.

(Click image for larger version)

I’m not sure what it all means yet, but it’s interesting. I see some possible applications with measuring media relations efforts, media placement and overall online reputation management.

Silobreaker also has a blog, if you’re interested in updates.

Thanks to Lois Kelly for blogging about this and another interesting but probably less practical tool (for my purposes), HubDub.

Journalism 2.0: a social network experiment

Despite the challenges “old media” face from the new world of social networking, these appear to be exciting times for journalists who are willing to embrace the new reality — or to at least experiment with it.

A new weblog, Beat Blogging, is one such experiment. The idea behind Beat Blogging is to connect reporters via a social network — a blog, in this case — to help them improve their beat reporting.

The group of 13 journalists — one each from various news organizations — includes a couple of journalist-bloggers whom I try to read occasionally:

Eric Berger, who blogs as SciGuy for the Houston Chronicle. Berger says he joined the network because he hopes “to raise the level of debate on my existing blog by adding considerably more commentary from practicing scientists, and giving scientists a non-threatening place to interact with the general public.”
Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired’s Listening Post blog. His editor, Evan Hansen, says, “One of the lessons we’ve learned is that blogging offers a fundamentally different relationship with readers than traditional newsgathering, and with this project we hope to tap even deeper into that phenomenon.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s news blog. The Chronicle is one of the 13 news organizations to take part in the experiment and has assigned Brad Wolverton, who covers the business of college sports, to Beat Blogging.

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