A friend of mine forwarded an Associated Press story today that described how a local news Web site in Pasadena, Calif. is looking for a reporter who can cover home town events from a base in India. Journalists, of course, tend to be a fairly cynical lot, and soon we were e-mailing each other jokes about being replaced by robots, which is also not that unlikely. But the story is interesting in part because of what it says about the difference between information and data, and how it can be managed across distances.
Journalists quoted in the AP story, of course, were appalled at the prospect. They said you can’t deliver quality news by simply calling people or watching events unfold over the Internet. This, despite the fact that a lot of locally-produced journalism, including the stuff you read on this site, comes through phone conversations or Webcasts.
