More people by far, we should all know by now,  go to the internet for news – especially in search of news that is not merely the five biggest headlines of the day – than rely on newspapers or whatever drifts past on television or radio. A tidy example of the jumble of sources that come at one is seen after one starts with an AP piece by Mauricio Cuevas, datelined “ABOVE ANTARCTICA.” He got on board a NASA DC-8 in Punta Arenas and, one guesses, filed this piece early in the flight. It’s short, tells us what the old converted jetliner is doing and why it is filling in for a younger but fast-aging satellite. It doesn’t have much on what is going on in the air. The operation is called Ice Bridge. The piece explains why that’s not just a metaphor but a reality for what one would have presumed would be, but is not, a robust data stream on sea ice on the Southern Ocean.

What catches the eye is that the piece links directly to a source of news, some of it near-live, from the flight: the space agency itself and some of its employees, contractors, and a few of its public relations people. These are NASA’s Ice Bridge blog (with a pretty good Q&A by a press officer and a mission scientist) and a Twitter feed. One of those tweets included a link to the pic above, shot from the plane.

The Tracker does not know if this is good, bad, or sideways for delivery of fast, responsible news. It does the blurry provenance and patchwork stitchery of old line, new line, grassroots, institutional, and other agents that collectively describe events for public consumption these days.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 10:50 am and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.