{"id":80,"date":"2006-03-16T21:34:30","date_gmt":"2006-03-16T11:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/?p=80"},"modified":"2006-03-16T21:34:30","modified_gmt":"2006-03-16T11:34:30","slug":"the-butterfly-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/?p=80","title":{"rendered":"The butterfly effect"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most gratifying aspects of journalism is the huge ripple you can cause as a result of a single piece of writing.<\/p>\n<p>Good, bad or indifferent, reporting the truth is the journalist&#8217;s duty. And if other journalists deem something they read to be truthworthy chances are it will be quickly disseminated in a manner they see fit. After all, the media can be the media for the media, no?<\/p>\n<p>Take today&#8217;s little <a href=\"http:\/\/www.computerworld.com.au\/index.php\/id;1355817094;fp;16;fpid;0\">gem<\/a> as an example. One of my moles at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.optus.com.au\">Optus<\/a> (every company has at least one, get over it) let me in on the company&#8217;s plans to make up to 450 positions redundant.<\/p>\n<p>The story hit the Internet just shy of 1pm this afternoon. Within two hours it was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zdnet.com.au\/news\/communications\/soa\/Optus_to_cut_450_positions\/0,2000061791,39246147,00.htm\">copied<\/a> by two <a href=\"http:\/\/australianit.news.com.au\/articles\/0,7204,18486714^15320^^nbv^,00.html\">other<\/a> industry titles. The snowball then bounced into general business news terrain through News Limited&#8217;s newspaper Web sites. AAP also joined in so the story also made it on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/news\/newsitems\/200603\/s1593647.htm\">ABC<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theage.com.au\/news\/Business\/Optus-to-shed-450-jobs-in-costcutting\/2006\/03\/16\/1142098590392.html\">Fairfax<\/a> newspapers.<\/p>\n<p>After close of business today, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.google.com\">Google News<\/a> had clipped 22 (some content repeated across different sites) instances of the original story. Not bad for about 20 minutes work \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>The same way a single flap of a butterfly&#8217;s wings in the Amazon can trigger a London thunderstorm, the whispers of a simple news brief can trigger governments into unusual state of action.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s the great thing about the job.<\/p>\n<p>Rodney<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most gratifying aspects of journalism is the huge ripple you can cause as a result of a single piece of writing&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,18,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daytoday","category-journalism","category-the-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}