The Second Row Seat to History

The first thing I expect any real "journo" out there to say is, "Ain't nothin' like the front row!"

I believe it.

But then I might think, "The front row gets kind of bumpy, and you have to drink the water . . . and whatever's coming off the field, watch out."

This is so much more comfortable: click--over to Burma; click--catch the story on de-mining at Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon; click--Hamas launches rockets against Israel, Israel responds (darned re-runs!); click--Somalia: the misery channel; click--Afghanistan (say, whatever happened to last week's kidnapped ICRC workers? Freed: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL272480.htm).

Drudge, so I've heard, made up the news and sometimes legitimately beat the real thing to the punch.

Oppenheim, et al: Reuters sends us "alerts", rough and ready first "graphs" of what's coming in from the field: hey, batter batter, hey!

Front row: get over to county records and find out who owns the building, the company, the land, the mineral rights, air rights; follow the money back to the owners, lenders, investors; learn something about each; look again at the deed: whatever the story, is it starting to make sense?

Second row: accept the field report; corroborate it, if possible; look further into the information woven into the Internet; any patterns? what is the material--action, clues, commentary--trying to tell you? are you "getting" it?

And, my favorite, how far from the first row is the second row, really?

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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