Any weekend shows that the so-called 24/7 news media operations is a myth.
Except for Google News and a few other exceptions that include AP, Thomson, Reuters, BBC and Bloomberg.
As you know, I tried yesterday to track the breaking news about the flight to Honduras of ousted president Celaya.
Well, it was a nightmare.
This morning I went to several premium news websites like Le Monde or Der Spiegel and what I found was old stories with no updated news about the trip.
But this was not the only story that caught our media Web sites sleeping or just watching Wimbledon.
In Bulgaria, there were crucial legislative elections and the government lost the polls in a big way.
Well, the same.
Many Web sites had just pre-election stories.
So, this is my question:
Do we really need news Web sites manually operated by small staffs that are not able to cover breaking news?
My take:
What smart news robots can do, must not be done by journalists.
Period.
It’s a waste of time, money and resources.
Use your multimedia journalists to add value to the breaking news.
Use your multimedia journalists to comment, analyze, explain and give background to the best stories.
And don’t just do what smart news robots do better, faster and cheaper.
(In the picture, the home page of the English Der Spiegel news Web site today at 9:45 am CET, with the pre-election story about Bulgaria).
