The New York Times Reports Its Own Demise

Okay, the headline is a little hyperbole, but not by much. The Times ran a story today about how an enterprising duo from New Jersey has created a service enabling reporters to go and cover the news.

The mall is home to a company called the Breaking News Network, started in the early 1990s by twin brothers who were working as electronics salesmen and who believed that journalists eager for a scoop would pay for a pager service that transmitted fragments of conversation culled from radio frequencies used by emergency responders, including police officers and firefighters.

The pager messages are terse, typically containing little more than a street address and a two- or three-word description of what is thought to be happening there. One recent alert was about an apparent car crash in Brooklyn: “Car Vs Bldg | 225a Wyckoff St Brooklyn, NY | 12/3/2008 8:52 a.m.”

Scant as they may be, those bits of information allow reporters and photographers to quickly start heading to the scene, giving them perhaps an advantage over their rivals or maybe allowing them to arrive in time to witness events firsthand.

Inside a sparsely furnished third-floor suite in the strip mall, in Fort Lee, a handful of employees work 24 hours a day, tapping out pager messages surrounded by the raspy crackle and chatter of scanners.

“It’s never a boring job,” one of the company’s founders, Steven Gessman, 49, said in the office where he works with his brother, Robert. “Just sitting here you’ll hear about a bank robbery in Manhattan or a fire in Brooklyn.”

The company, which does not disclose its rates, has subscribers beyond journalists, including public safety officials, insurance adjusters, utility workers, tow truck operators. Many assignment editors at television stations and daily papers consider the pagers a necessity, if only because they know the competition subscribes.

Breaking News Network alerts reporters and photographers to breaking news stories around the region, particularly car crashes, accidents, fires, and criminal activities by scanning police frequencies and other broadcasts. They ferret out the real breaking news from the usual assortment of daily calamities.

Anyone can buy the service, and use it to do their own reporting. Citizen journalists - bloggers - could do the same. Many around the nation do something similar using Twitter and blogging services to break news stories.

Gothamist has a mapping service that plots locations of emergency responses throughout the City. An intrepid blogger could use these services to trump the local news and break developing situations. Spread out across the nation, and you've got the makings of a news network with a greater reach than the New York Times. Where the Times could seemingly excel is at investigative reporting and breaking stories of national import, but losing out on local news means that they'd be losing one more reason for people to go to the Times for their news.