Online government services and zombie press notices

June 2, 2009 in Social Media

links for 2009-06-02

I posted the following item to del.icio.us the other day:

• Public in the dark over e-government

But it got swept up into a “tidy up” aggregation of such items and the original post was moved, which broke a link to this page from Public Strategy as a result.

Public Strategy was using the link as a jumping-off point for a really interesting article about “zombie press notices” – about how the piecemeal coverage in press notices and resulting web site articles made it hard to actually get to the meat of the story in question – a real failure of (a) people writing press releases, and (b) too many journalists who do a mediocre job of processing the press releases they are spoon fed. C’mon, guys, journalism is more than just a bit of word processing! (That’s my spin on the situation, by the way, and not necessarily the thoughts of the Public Strategy article – don’t mean to misrepresent. Go see the article if you want to see what they say!)

I thought it was a great pick up on a topic that had never occurred to me when I was grazing the original Computing magazine piece linked to via de.icio.us when I was really just interested in the headline figures.

I make no such claims to be a journalist, so while the irony is not lost on me – that I was as content as the journalists with the original Computing magazine piece as it stood for the basic data – I can still claim that there’s a difference between bookmarking an article and writing one professionally, and I’m sticking to that line!

Anyway, I wanted to reinstate the original link so that Public Strategy‘s link wasn’t broken, and more importantly to allow me to point to a really interesting new post that I’m happy to be name checked in and to have been even peripherally involved in sparking off.