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CNN Hacks New TV Technology

Your impression when tuning in to CNN’s The Situation Room for the first time is likely to be, "Geez, there’s a lot going on here."

There is. And much of it involves technologies familiar to internet regulars, but mostly unheard of in the context of TV newscasts.

Throughout the daily, three-hour show, a split video wall behind host Wolf Blitzer displays up to six separate feeds, often topically unrelated to each other.

Then — bam! Time for an iChat AV interview with "Interdictor," the blogger holed up in a New Orleans data center, or blogger Joi Ito, live from Japan with a Borglike headset.

Now we jump to RSS feeds trickling in from newspapers. Blitzer surfs the headlines, just as you might skim an RSS reader on your laptop. Next, "internet reporters" Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner read excerpts from selected blogs.

Launched in August and modeled after the White House Situation Room — where presidents confer with advisers on fast-moving matters of utmost importance — CNN’s Situation Room has become something of an R&D lab for news-gathering technology.

"It’s like bringing viewers inside our control room and allowing them to move through all of that raw, incoming information with us," Blitzer told Wired News.

By Xeni Jardin

Full Story: http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68859,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

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