Got a few responses on my earlier blog on how news makes the front page. The smartest of which came from Stephen Shankland of C/Net who disagreed – sort of – with my comments on Google news.

“In some ways, Google News is richer than any single news outlet, but the flip side is that Google News favors stories that are widely reported. It’s a convenient algorthim that screens out a lot of fringy bunkum, but it also means you miss stories that are important but that the media herd hasn’t trampled to yet. In other words, you only get the news that’s already a commodity. I’m not sure that disadvantage offsets the advantage of seeing a broader pool of editorial sources.”

He’s right – You get the news everyone is reading when everyone is reading it, but you don’t get the news first. So for us news hounds the onus is still on to dig for news sources that have a tendency to break the news rather than aggregate it. And as far as breaking the news go, Shankland along with Ashlee Vance at El Reg, are amongst the best. No pandering to PR people there – they actually clock the hard miles looking for news…