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January 24, 2006
When I'm in Canberra I have Sky News on the television whilst I'm waiting for the Parliamentary feed to come on. So I'm usually watching the 24 hour rolling news on Foxtel whilst I'm working.
I do find 24 hour rolling news on television ---the concept of a separate channel and its traditional front-end studio format based on a line of wire copy copied and pasted from Reuters or AP----- boring. I cannot understand what all the fuss is about. It looks like yesterday from the perspective of the digital world that I live in.
Paul Mason writing in The Guardian comments on this opinion:
With news websites starting to fill up with audio and video clips, we are seeing just the beginning of "convergence". When TV over broadband is fully fledged, and the video stream is the dominant element on the page, seamlessly linked to background material and even services, Sky News and News 24 will suddenly look old-fashioned. Almost every other product in the digital broadcast space is a finite piece of video, designed to be downloaded, repeated, paused, shared and even "mashed up".
I do want the timely, authored, edited summary of what has happened - "breaking" or otherwise - updated to reflect new knowledge and events. But I can get this on the web in an instant.
I find the syntax of the web, with its development to converged media, preferable to the rolling channel format. One can ask: "what's the point of rolling news on television?" I 'm much more interested in the convergence between television and the PC. Alas it is yet to be delivered in Australia.
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Politics and their satellite and subsidiary industries don't like narrow casting. I am constantly amazed how little primary political sources I can find on the internet. Beazley was happy to talk to The Australian about the cabinet resuffle but I can't find anything on the ALP website about it. The Liberals had the media release, and the Greens had two sentences. That is more internet hostile than friendly.