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by James Robertson.
Original Post: What makes a story?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
There are times that I just sit back and try to figure out how and why some things get huge wads of media attention, and other things just disappear. For instance - I was curious about the Fannie Mae scandal, so I did a BottomFeeder search (internal). Turns out that out of the 293 feeds I track (including a bunch of news and political sites), there were 2 items. Just for comparison purposes, I checked for the Enron Scandal (a much older story) - there were 9 items. Curious. A google search for the two turns up 1330 for Fannie Mae and a whopping 82,500 for Enron.
Now, I'm not trying to make a political point here - I'm honestly curious about the process whereby some things get to be news, and some things don't. For instance - the Lori Hacking murder got played all over - it was hardly the only murder story around. What elevated it and made it "big"? Or gosh, how did that horrid Laci Peterson story get to be this year's OJ trial?.
It's a curious thing. Some stories pop up and become huge, sucking up all the media oxygen, while others just fade away.
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