[bardworx]

Currently, I believe social media is the best source of news; usually it is a first person account.

I was referring to a internal system which reporters and producers share which doesn't have a public feed.

If you watch some news reports, you'll notice a bunch of people at their desks with a small screen next to their larger monitors. That smaller screen is something like an IRC chat which is used to coordinate assets between reporters and producers.

http://radio.foxnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/FNCNewsr...

This is from fox news - notice those small monitors that look out of place.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8018/7405270916_7cd37ba78f_b.j...

This is from CNN, notice that most monitors have CNN as their screen saver while some, with no one sitting next to them, have block boxes.

[parm289]

Thanks for the insight. Are there any particular social media sources you like to use? I find that Twitter and reddit are the most real-time, but reddit can often carry its own biases as well. Twitter seems like it could be the best social media news source if field reporters released news directly through their streams (ie not tweeting as a representative of FOX or NBC). Essentially the IRC chat you mentioned above, but public-facing.

[bardworx]

Unfortunately I won't be very helpful here as I really just stopped listening/readying/watching news actively. I'll browse a news aggregate like Hacker News and bi-weekly do a Google News browse but that's about it.

I can't find the quote now but it was from an editor of a news magazine who said something like: If you didn't read the news for a whole year, away from civilization, you probably wouldn't miss anything very important.