Okay, I'll be the first to admit that this post's title is probably lavishing a bit too much praise on just one news organization. After all, it is just one news organization, with reporters just like any other (albeit, however, with many, many more reporters all over the world).
Still, I will say the Associated Press is always coming in handy in one way or another. First of all, it makes sure all information is consistent in papers who run it. A reader in Taiwan is going to get the same information as a person in New York. There is something nice about that, and the wire service can also fill pages where a paper does not have enough content to do so.
I guess this came into my head on Tuesday night as I was night editor of The Daily Illini. The thing that made me talk about this was not the amount of stories we can pull off the wire, but rather how often a story was updated.
The big story right now, of course, is the financial crisis. When I came in to start at 5 p.m., the story was at its 18th write through of the day. During news conference, I said I would pull the story at the absolute latest time so the story could be the most up-to-date.
By 9:45, when I pulled the story, it was at its 24th write through. In 4 hours, 45 minutes, there were six updates to the story.
The Associated Press is a great example, at least to me, about how a breaking news story should be handled. More newsrooms should strive to update their online stories more often as more news comes in. It would make the readers come back more, while really painting as good of a picture of what is going on as possible.
What The Associated Press does is not impossible to do in a lot of newsrooms (most have reporters or editors there all day, it can be done), and it would just make a newsroom look more thorough. If it did that, though, it would be.
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