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Hello, it's your news calling

By Bill Mitchell, Special to the Times
In print: Monday, July 21, 2008

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Reaching for my slick new iPhone as I blinked awake just before 6 a.m. Wednesday, my first moves had nothing to do with the ballgame I abandoned in the third inning the night before.

In the course of checking e-mail, though, I stumbled across a news alert from the New York Times reporting the American League victory. Ho-hum. No surprise there. The National League hasn't won in more than a decade.

So I clicked away in search of my favorite new iPhone app: the Facebook feature that stacks up status reports from friends. Near the top: an entry from Steve Dorsey in Detroit: "1:30 a.m.? 15th Inning?"

Now this was a news alert that grabbed my attention. Dorsey happens to work for my former employer, the Detroit Free Press. But his early morning Facebook post was, as you might guess, personal as opposed to professional.

Dorsey's headline sent me back to that NYT e-mail. As much as the iPhone makes clicking through to full news articles easy — even enjoyable — nothing about the newspaper's alert provoked me to do so.

I figured the game had ended too late for the print edition of either Times awaiting me in the driveway. The regional edition of the New York Times, printed in Lakeland, isn't much for news after midnight. Although I get a late edition of my local paper, the St. Petersburg Times, it seemed unlikely that the staff could have accomplished much in the precious moments between the final out and the final turn of the Times presses on 34th Street.

Like most journalists, I wonder how print newspapers will survive the erosion of their revenues by digital competitors unburdened by costly news operations. But it's not every day I get an object lesson in print and digital media before my first cup of coffee.

A couple of surprises awaited me in the papers I rescued from the predawn sprinkler.

Even more impressive than Evan Longoria's game-tying double or Scott Kazmir's win was the feat of delivering so much locally focused, late news by the St. Pete Times. (Yes, the paper is owned by the school where I work. But I doubt that had anything to do with my appreciation of how well the printed paper measured up against the news I chose not to pursue on my iPhone.)

Nothing surprised me about the New York Times coverage of the game (there wasn't any in print). But the headline above a column written by restaurant critic Frank Bruni (a former Free Press reporter) caught my eye: "Where to Eat? Ask Your iPhone."

I doubted that Bruni would be teaching me anything about my iPhone — or that my iPhone would be very useful getting restaurant information in St. Pete.

Wrong on both counts, beginning with Bruni's fifth paragraph: "I shook the iPhone, which is how you activate a search."

What's this? I saw nothing about shaking the thing in the 152 pages of iPhone documentation I'd waded through.

Bruni's column sent me scurrying to my phone to download the free Urbanspoon application. With its GPS tracking my location a few miles from downtown St. Pete, the iPhone presented me with something I didn't know about my favorite Thai place on Central Avenue: Only 60 percent of 25 voters say they like place as much as I do.

It turns out Bruni wasn't kidding. Shaking is how you sort restaurants by location, cuisine and price on Urbanspoon.

If only those embattled veterans of the Detroit newspaper wars could see me now: Delivering a chunk of my news by shaking the phone in my hand. And getting the real scoop on the ballgame from a paper hot off the press.

Bill Mitchell is director of Poynter Online, a Web site for journalists published by the Poynter Institute, the school for journalists that owns the St. Petersburg Times.