Newsday (New York, NY) October 10, 2001 Wednesday
All the Original News That's Fit to Surf
By Lou Dolinar
ONE OF THE stunning achievements of globalization and the Internet is that I can sit in the privacy of my own home, surf to a newspaper Web site in Pakistan, and read the exact same AP story that 400 American newspapers have on their sites.
Cynical me. I don't know about you, but in a crisis, I want news, not recycled wire service copy. There's a case to be made for picking one news site and sticking with it through the day - you waste a lot less time that way. But a true news junkie thrives on variety and exclusivity. Over the years, I've come up with a system for finding it on the Web. Start your day with Slate's indispensable "Today's Papers" a cogent, five-minute read on what the major dailies - The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal - have to say.
While it goes without saying that the people who run these papers pretty much think alike in what they put on the front page, writer Scott Shuger has a knack for noticing the exclusives that only big news organizations like these customarily deliver. He also picks up on when they contradict each other, as in last week when he pointed out that The New York Times had the Taliban collapsing as the Post indicated they were strengthening their control. I trust "Today's Papers" sufficiently to skip a direct read of any of these sites, though I return to them later in the day. Would that Slate's "International Papers" was as useful - it ain't.
Next stop, the Drudge Report. OK, I know that as a journalist, I'm not supposed to be a Drudge fan, but the guy has terrific, if occasionally flaky news judgment. You probably get a better flavor here for just how contradictory some of the reporting has been on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts - fleeing the country, in Kabul, in a bunker, at a camp. Drudge links to lots of foreign papers, some of which appear to be getting information from their governments that our government isn't providing. Much of it wrong, of course.
In the grand scheme of things, your next stop is the local paper covering the Big Story, which in all likelihood is gunning for a Pulitzer Prize on its own turf and deploying armies of reporters. Back during the election recount, it was the Miami Herald. In the case of the World Trade Center atrocity, it has been Newsday, the New York Post and the Daily News.
Newspapers have become more Drudge-like in how they run their Web sites-updating as the situation warranted. Not too long ago, you got the same stories as the a.m. paper, plus the same wire service feeds throughout the day. Now, more papers are feeding their "real" coverage to the Web site before it makes the paper. Heck, my latest story - on how terrorists use petty credit card fraud to pay their bills - showed up on our Web site long before it ran in the dead tree edition. My wife, who works at Newsday.com, tells me all the online papers are getting positively twitchy about who can put up the breaking story first.
In doing so, they're following not just Drudge, but the big cable news sites, CNN, FOX and MSNBC, any one of which, on a good day, can churn out its own exclusives. I'm not even going to discuss their Web sites - all very good, but I normally just leave the TV on and flip channels once in a while.
I still spend a fair amount of time on Free Republic (www.freerepublic.com), a conservative to far right site that used to be the best clipping service on the Web and the most efficient way to cover a lot of ground in a hurry. Basic idea: A few hundred thousand news junkies copy stories from their favorite sites, post 'em and then offer comments. More news, less fluff.
Alas, our corporate parent and a few other papers sued for copyright violations, and so most of the nation's top papers no longer appear. Still worth a read for foreign coverage and magazine articles, but only if you like that brand of politics. You also might want to take a look at democrats.com.
So much for politics and news, how about a little depth?
One of the must-read sites on the war, which I will plug shamelessly, belongs to my old boss Jim Dunnigan, www.strategypage.com. Historian, author, pundit and war game designer par excellence, Jim's been writing about war for 30 years. He has a god-like reputation among war game fans, and since these folks are scattered through military ranks around the world, he has the darndest sources, whom he never quotes, but whose gossipy e-mails and phone calls end up in quirky but insightful essays (the most recent comparing tactics against the American Indians to what we need to do in Afghanistan).
What can we say about Jane's (www.janes.com)? The Internet has been good to the 100-year-old British conglomerate that made the fat blue hardcover Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships the definitive guide to warships for decades. In recent years, it has turned into a conglomerate with a dozen or so publications, multiple Web sites and consulting contracts. Coverage has branched out into terrorism, intelligence gathering, missiles and other good stuff. If you want to know something about something military, Jane's probably has done the definitive take. Much of this finds its way to their site on a daily basis in truncated form - leaving you with the option of buying the good parts. As the war on terror has developed, I've noticed quite a few astute print reporters are stealing ideas from Jane's.
A relative newcomer to the Web is GlobalSecurity.org, a three-man think tank founded by the oft-quoted John Pike. Pike is one of those rarities, a man of the left who is genuinely interested and informed in the technologies of killing people and breaking things. Formerly with the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org), whose Web site still houses many of John's greatest hits on the National Security Agency's spy satellites, his new operation has on display some incredibly cool satellite photos of bin Laden training camps. Another good site for left-leaning military affairs is the Center for Defense Information (www.cdi.org), which has a fair number of dovish but expert ex-military officers on staff.
We'll look at more sites next week, plus search engines.
Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc.
