From the ME: Betanews releases Alpha

"This is an old team," began Edward R. Murrow in his very first See It Now broadcast for CBS Television, "trying to learn a new trade."

Now, over the past few years, I've been guilty of telling folks that Betanews is not a blog, in the same spirit as telling your neighbor trying to borrow your sports car to haul furniture that it's not a truck. A few reasons for that: I don't want Betanews to become one of these peanut-galleries for the practice of would-be journalism -- of essentially replicating stories seen or printed elsewhere and calling it "coverage." We won't be doing that here, and thus ends my list of the things that Betanews Alpha is not.

What Alpha is, is a place where stories and ideas begin. I've argued for over two decades that online journalism can have an advantage over print and television, in that it can present the facts as they emerge, in a literary manner. Our purpose here will be to start discourses and sessions about the important aspects of information technology. I want to avoid saying we're here to "start a dialog" with you, in an effort not to sound like Hillary Clinton or Rush Limbaugh, or anyone else who has ever camouflaged a one-way diatribe in the garb of a two-way dialog.

That said, once we isolate the parts of the journalistic process with greater granularity, we realize that stories, such as they are, are not complete capsules of information. News evolves, alters, metamorphoses into a form and direction we often don't expect. Whereas a newspaper is often charged with the duty of revealing "the whole story," at our level -- where everything is live and unfolding simultaneously -- there rarely is any such thing. The complete picture only emerges once you, the reader, are given the tools and resources to piece together the various interlocking facets.

So that's our purpose here: to paraphrase Sen. Howard Baker, to more frequently tell you what we know when we know it. And when the world changes and we know something else, or we learn that what we thought we knew is actually something different, we'll tell you that too.