Despite the timezone differences I have covered news from all over the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. I have written conference reports, examined license releases, got facts about GPLs day at the court house, reported on Government's stance on Free Software, a particular monopoly's tactics to influence local Government, and such.
However much I miss reporting I don't anymore, because frankly, there is no news. Most of the PR chatter is product announcement, tie-ups, or change in licensing -- in fact the last one irks me like no other. And there's no dearth of bloggers-in-the-guise-of-reporters from respectable media houses who'll cover these, make a fool of themselves, and get popular.
I'd love to do community news, but since most of them use their personal blogs or social blogs like /. and Digg, to break the news, there's not much left for a reporter to report.
Or is there?
Somewhere between writing announcements to blogging, people forgot what reporting is about. I don't want to go all technical on you, but a good report should put things into perspective. Most of the so called community press does try to put things into perspective, but they infuse the report with their own interpretations. A news report is not an opinion piece!
Yet there's nothing more readers love than a bigger-picture news pigeonholed into gossip. Case in point is all the noise around the "Linus Torvalds dumps KDE for GNOME" statement. Apparently the "OMG, KDE is so dead" contingent of readers is much stronger than the so-what "who gives a shit?" group, and the analytical "but why?" group is in utter minority.
A good news "report" these days is one from which you can link back to atleast two of your previous ones, to prove that you were right all along. Call me old school, but I don't consider this reporting, and I know I'm in the minority on the issue.
The good thing is I like writing other stuff as well, and I can get people to read what I write.
PS: I must plug a few sites here. If you want good intelligent community news, read LWN, DistroWatch, and the new OSNews. Don't believe me? See for yourself. sReadAhead v1.0 was released yesterday. I can bet you that you'll find good coverage about it at one of these sites. Since it's something a little more technical than the average blogger-in-reporters-skin can comprehend, they'll wait for someone to break this down in terms of its impact on boot time and such, before rubbishing it or hailing it as the Linux-on-USB savior.
