November 6, 2008 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Newsfeed
Highly regarded political expert and real estate investing authority Bryan Ellis gave his daily update for the sixth of November, 2008:
- Two days into Barack Obama’s status as President-elect, the stock market has taken a serious beating. Nearly 1,000 points of decline on the Dow Jones Industrial Average suggest that the financial markets are, at best, unsure of the next President of the United States
- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered his congratulations to Obama today. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
- The turnout at the polls for the 2008 election were statistically similar to the turnout in 2004. This does not portend as well for Democrats as possible, since clearly a large number of Republicans stayed home, and the entire popular vote differential between Obama and McCain was from atypical voters who are unlikely to be a reliable voting bloc
- The price of crude oil continues to plummet. Regular gasoline can be had for under $2 per gallon in many U.S. cities.
- Sarah Palin is as popular as ever, and everybody wants to interview her it seems. She’s laying low for now and getting some much needed rest.
- The mainstream media is showing their bias again by only now - after Obama is elected - admitting that they really know very little about him and what he stands for. Notably Tom Brokaw, who should be ashamed of himself.
“Without a doubt, Obama’s election hasn’t done anything to calm the financial markets” said Bryan Ellis.
August 26, 2008 at 10:03 am · Filed under Best Marketing, Information Parlor, Newsfeed
We move back to the world of media with our latest Behnd the Scenes article. From the oldest practitioners to the newer entrants, wire services have been a staple of news reporting for almost 200 years. Today, we look at them in more detail.
News agencies are companies that employ writers to create news stories that can be distributed to various news outlets - often including mainstream media as well as independent or online news sources. The term ‘news service’ is sometimes used to mean a similar type of organisation.
In some circumstances, they may be groups that profit from selling the news to the news outlets. A number of news agencies chose to enter a co-operative agreement with a major news outlet, with the small agency creating local news that may be picked up and shared regionally or nationally by the bigger news agency. Business can also pay a commercial service to publicise a particular news article or story.
In many cases, a national wire service may be controlled by the government, with a remit to share official news articles as well as others; the UK, Russia and China all have such services in place.
The largest of the the wire services produce both factual articles and speical features that do not need to be rewritten by the media company, who can purchase the stories and reproduce them almost verbatim.
Agencies provide collections of the articles to their customers over the Internet - so the origins of the name wire service, which lay in telegraph systems, are not entirely lost.
It is often not just publishers that require the constant flow of prepared news stories, and many research departments or interested companies may subscribe to an agency. As an alternative to the existing agencies, some news services are available that are not affiliated with any other business or state departments - these indie services are a potential outlet for stories that need to demonstrate independence from other companies.
It has been known for some companies to use wire services to distribute positive reports of a comapny that have been prepared by a friendly business analyst. If a company does not receive a great deal of other articles about it, then such non-independent articles may have an unduly positive effect on the business.
