In yet another example of New Media trouncing Old Media… Raleigh’s own News and Observer was a full three days behind NewRaleigh in covering this unannounced addition to NC Central Prison. In fairness, the addition was announced somewhere on the Prison’s webpage, and there was at least a mentioning of it at one City Council meeting. However, there was no additional effort on the part of the Department of Corrections to notify the immediate neighbors of the property. At the time of my writing this there is still no mention of the neighborhood meeting to be held tonight, nor the prison expansion in general on the WRAL webpage.

Being an occasional contributor to NewRaleigh and a personal blogger myself, I’m naturally a proponent of the social networking aspect of Web 2.0 and the blogging phenomenon… but it’s this kind of grassroots story being entirely missed by several major news agencies for days that really drives home, to me, the need for this kind of news. You can talk all day long about the checks and balances in corporate media, but I’m always going to gravitate towards the little guy.

(images from Schenkel Shulz)

Update:

As of sometime this afternoon (According to their webpage 1:15, but I have my doubts) WRAL has finally gotten some coverage of the story as well. Their blurb is even less comprehensive than the N&O’s. I wonder if there would have been a little quicker coverage if the affected neighborhood had been Mordecai?

Update 2:

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the WRAL staff checks my blog and decided to lengthen their article.