Last week at the Online News Association I became convinced the mobile web is the most exciting platform for the future of journalism. More on that later.
And I don’t think the generation of people who will come to rely on their smart phones for like, everything, is the crappiest generation - as this guest on the late-night chat show Conan O’Brien says.
However, I like everything else he’s saying on this funny four-minute viral video. It basically amounts to: Rapid-fire technology is cool, but… Let’s just all keep breathing, kay?
“It’s going to space!!! Will you give it a second to get back from space?!”
Journalists, especially those of us who have yet to publish our best-selling book or start that chat show, don’t often have a particularly interesting financial portfolio.
And those of us who don’t work the business beat often know little about the stock market. To our (readers’ ?) detriment, likely. But there’s always time to learn…
Enter the bull and bear cartoons! Thanks to my boyfriend, who perhaps knows (read: obsesses) a little too much about the stock market, I have been introduced to the Emmy-winning team of Hoof and Boo. They’re easily the most fun way to warm up to a perusal of market news.
According to an AFP report on EuroBusiness, Bulgarian reporters are crafting bogus weather reports to skirt a law that bans them from releasing exit poll data from the European elections.
I love this!
In the United States, everyone always fears exit poll data from the East Coast will influence voters on the West Coast. The concern is that people in California feel defeated and less likely to vote if they see that voters around the country have overwhelmingly turned out for Candidate A instead of Candidate B.
So I’m sure EU politicians who banned the reporting of exit polling data until voting finished are worried about similar problems - especially since the elections are unfolding over June 4 - June 9.
Still, its my opinion that the media’s job is to inform the citizens. What the citizens do with that data is up to them (security issues aside).
This line from the AFP especially made me smile:
“Like the Audrey Hepburn character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” who relays coded mafia messages to a jailed don, the BGNES news agency beat a close-of-voting 7:00 pm (1600 GMT) legal embargo with some curious temperatures.
As Bulgaria basked in temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), the agency reported that temperatures near the Sofia municipality were 25 degrees Celsius compared to 22 degrees near the Socialist Party headquarters.
In other words, the right-wing GERB party of Sofia mayor Boyko Borisov was winning a quarter of all votes, while the Socialist party of Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev was trailing.”
