We’ve grown accustomed to hearing how our increasing reliance on tech is bad for us. It’s nice to see a story about the opposite. Two GA news stories today demonstrated how everyday people (non-geeks) have adopted tech and used it to help combat crime.
In Covington, GA, a store clerk accessed a local news website with her mobile phone (not an iPhone, Blackberry, or Android device) to correctly identify a robbery suspect and get him captured by police. This underscores how important it is to have a mobile-friendly website if its primary function is to provide information (instead of solely focusing on apps).
In a more serious situation, two women were tied up in their Kirkwood home by a man who robbed them, including their car. As I write this, the suspect hasn’t been caught. However, one of the women used her toes to call for help and send an IM to her boyfriend. I wonder if she’s on Twitter.
Photo: dan taylor [Flickr]
“1. the issue with the kanye deal is that when the president is getting miked up and there is chit chat going out over a fiber line, is it inappropriate for another network to broadcast (in a cyber way) the chit chat. I think it was inappropriate, and abc did too, which is why they took it down and apologized,” she said via e-mail.
“2. I do believe the issue of ‘off the record’ is different when the person you are talking about is the president. I don’t particularly care [if] the President swats a fly or calls Kanye an ass off the record. But maybe that’s just me. If he changes his health care stand off the record, that is unacceptable. . . . I would stop. I would object. If he insisted, I would ask him (and the press staff) if I could negotiate later to put the comments on the record.
“Keep in mind, no President I’ve covered ever really thinks he is completely off the record, or he would not be talking to a reporter.
“3. On the other hand, I have been involved in dozens of ‘off the record’ conversations you will never hear about, because i will not talk about them. That’s what ‘off the record’ means.
“Background conversations, like the meal with Secretary Rice, are far more useful, because you can use the information without attribution. For a television reporter, most of what happens without a camera present is de facto background anyway. If what a reporter is looking for [is] information that will help you better understand an issue, background is useful. Surely we know (or, as news professionals, ought to know) where to draw the line without cutting off our noses to spite our faces — and putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage at the same time.”
via Richard Prince’s Journal-isms
“You can’t have a newsroom that is full of elite privilege. And sometimes that includes — I’ll say it — white men. You can’t have just white men running the news business. You’ve gotta have diversity in the newsrooms.”
— Jami Floyd
The Wire: The Last Word
