NPR's China Coverage

The news coverage of the China earthquake has been heartbreaking. The scenes on television are just unreal, almost unbelievable; disaster on this scale is hard to comprehend.

But some things are still best conveyed by radio. It can be a tremendous medium for storytelling.

National Public Radio ran a story on the quake's aftermath this afternoon that, well, completely tore me up. It took me quite a while to recover from it.

Melissa Block, on the ground in China, accompanied survivors as they frantically clawed through the rubble of their collapsed apartment building, looking for their loved ones.

The story is about 12 minutes long, and is so evocative of the horror on the ground that it is, candidly, really hard to take... but it's also one of the best pieces of radio journalism I think I've ever heard.

The ordinarily stalwart Ms. Block was not keeping it together all that well at points, and I have to say I was right there with her... the hell with journalistic (or personal) detachment in a situation like this.

Google News adds comments... for subjects of articles only

Beginning this week, Google News will start posting user comments, but only from people actually featured in news stories. Newspapers that were unhappy about Google News using snippets of their articles will probably be even less pleased to see the new feature deployed, since Google could become an even more formidable player when it starts hosting original content.

Here's how the new system will work: people or organizations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments—unedited—alongside the Google News links to those stories.

The new system will at first be deployed only within the US, but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well.

Freedom from the press: Google News lets newsmakers comment on stories (ArsTechnica)

Well, sure, we could try that, I guess

The family that owns The Wall Street Journal is meeting with Rupert Murdoch on Monday to discuss issues of journalistic integrity and standards.

Rupert Murdoch.

Journalistic standards.

Let that sink in.

(As Mahatma Gandhi famously said when asked his opinion of Western Civilization: "I think it would be a very good idea.")

CJR: Beyond News

Editors and news directors today fret about the Internet, as their predecessors worried about radio and TV, and all now see the huge threat the Web represents to the way they distribute their product. They have been slower to see the threat it represents to the product itself. In a day when information pours out of digital spigots, stories that package painstakingly gathered facts on current events — what happened, who said what, when — have lost much of their value. News now not only arrives astoundingly fast from an astounding number of directions, it arrives free of charge. Selling what is elsewhere available free is difficult, even if it isn’t nineteen hours stale. Just ask an encyclopedia salesman, if you can find one.

Mainstream journalists can, of course, try to keep retailing somewhat stale morning-print or evening-television roundups to people who manage to get through the day without any contact with Matt Drudge, Wolf Blitzer, or Robert Siegel. They can continue to attempt to establish themselves online as a kind of après AP — selling news that’s a little slower but a little smarter than what Yahoo displays, which is essentially what The Washington Post and The New York Times were up to when, about four or five hours after Chavez had left the UN podium, they published, online, their own accounts of his speech.

But another, more ambitious option is available to journalists: They could try to sell something besides news.

"Beyond News," Mitchell Stevens, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan/Feb 2007