NEW KID ON THE MEDIA BLOCK

I have a friend who used to work for Frontline and is now working for Al Jazeera America, so I checked in last night on a few of the evening news shows and again tonight. A lot of it is the same old stuff, including many of the faces, unfortunately. But there were a few things I noticed that seemed a little more unique to this new news network, including more thorough coverage of foreign stories like the weather and floods in China etc..

And like how in a story on the president coming back from his one week vacation with his family, they used that as a springboard to comment on how few working people in the USA get actual paid vacations, and threw up a graph to show how we compared to some European and Asian countries where paid vacations are legally mandatory. We came out last of course, because we have none (they wound the story up with the fact that members of Congress get much longer vacations than anything Obama has taken, but didn't add especially compared to our last president, Bush Junior).

There were definitely more Middle-Eastern-American faces and focus on the news impacting them, which was different, and the segment at 7:30, I think it's called Streaming, includes contributors on Skype and in the studio and online etc. for a half hour focused on one topic, last night's being the divisions in Egypt (explained by people who live there or have relatives who have died in the recent violence etc.) and tonight's being women in comedy with Kathy Griffin as the main guest. The other Skyped in guests were all female comedians representing cities and ethnicities you don't see on the other news shows much if at all.

All in all, so far, there's been the usual top stories and political perspectives for a lot of them, but also here and there a different perspective and a different, and at times more thorough, presentation. Hope they take more chances and do what they claim they will do: give us stories the other news shows don't.