Quick Action Helps Google Win Friends in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Quick Action Helps Google Win Friends in Japan

nytimes.com

17 pointsbdr6 comments

Another convert is Sachiko Kobayashi. She lives in Sendai, a city at the heart of the tsunami zone, and was in Kesennuma looking for a friend, a fellow student in the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument. After Ms. Kobayashi posted a query on a separate Web site, a stranger directed her to Person Finder. There, she learned that her friend was alive.

There's a little trick to reading the New York Times, most commonly disaster reporting or any time the story takes place in conditions of extreme hardship: any time you see "a stranger", replace it with the reporter's name. They do it out of a perceived ethical stricture to avoid putting themselves in the center of the story.

After you know this exists, you'll see it a lot.

I could see that, but is that necessarily the case all the time (particularly if you see it a lot)? I'd be surprised if it wasn't ever the case that they just didn't have permission, or the time, ability, or necessity to track down a person, to cite them by name.

Sometimes strangers are just strangers. Sometimes when the NYT reports that a congressman has been sleeping with his pages it means that he was overcome with boredom while trying to get through a printout of the budget. I wouldn't bet that way, but it has probably happened.

Pick a likely verb, for example "asked", then look at the kinds of situations where "asked a stranger" comes up. See if it makes more sense for them to be a) a bystander who we couldn't track down but, nonetheless, are sure has no pre-existing relationship to the person doing the asking or b) a NYT reporter.

Yup. And a huge number of people quoted in NYT articles are immediate friends or one degree away in the reporter's social network.

And there's a whole email list ("Help a Reporter Out") where PR pros find "experts" to happily mouth quotes on demand for reporters (e.g. "Seeking Professor of Media Studies to comment on violent video games phenomenon"). The idea is that helping a grateful reporter out of a deadline jam in this way will then get your client a good story.

In general, the story behind a story is usually more interesting than the story.

This is a great example of the benefits of modern technology. Many things in the modern web are toys: this is not. This is really a noble tool.

I love when Google does things like that. There's an unique opportunity today to leverage modern technology to actually help people in their troubles. It might be a way of marketing, but whatever popularity they gain by it, I believe it's deserved.

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