11/21/2012 News Service Update

AMERICAN ADMIRALTY BOOKS  CONTENT UPDATE

Alexander Von Humbolt II , Photo By Hans George Schroder

CHANGES TO OUR NEWS SERVICE

  Our News Service feature began as a sort of "Reading Room" where our visitors could locate and link to newspapers of the world and all of the specialized maritime trade journals. As we have stated before we are not a news organization. However as we reviewed maritime events around the world in order to prepare certain "opinion piece" blog postings we noticed that the American  general news media appears to have a blind spot when it comes to maritime and naval developments. Additional experience showed us that general media around the world also tended to have such a blind spot, but often local news papers picked up on important stories that the non daily professional maritime journals did not. We also came to appreciate that our staff's individual memberships in various professional organizations actually gave us access to quite a few stories of major importance but often revealed days ahead of the general media via these organizations daily E-mail services and E-News letters. 

 So we started our "Headline Services". The head line services consisted of selected headlines (what we felt were the under reported or most important stories) of the day, and back about 30 days with hyperlinks to the best English language news coverage we could find, or if absolutely necessary a short write up by our own staff. We also provide a Retained Headline Service. The Retained Headline Service features headlines and links to original news coverage of older headlines that we cull from our over 30 day Headline Service listings. We try to select those stories that we think will be of historical interest or of use to journalists looking for background material on stories that continue, or "have legs" as they are sometimes described.
 

 The two headline services were becoming quite long and being on a scroll system had pushed the NEWS SOURCES (Titles, descriptions, and links to professional maritime journals), and the OPINION, and EDITORIAL Sections so far down the scroll that unless a new visitor actually read the introduction section to the News Service they would probably never stumble across the original "Reading Room" features. So today we moved the original Reading Room features, the links to professional news sources to the top of the scroll and shifted the headline services down. 

  We believe this change brings the NEWS SERVICE back to our original intent as a "Reading Room" for maritime news with an enhanced service in the form of a sort of reference desk news letter consisting of our Headline Service and Retained headline Service. We have not abandoned our scanning of the world's maritime news and have in fact expanded our efforts. The American Admiralty Information Service (AAIS) parent organization of the American Admiralty Book blog is not adverse to forming an actual maritime news service if we can properly identify the under served areas.  But our concentration at the moment is on perfecting the American Admiralty Books site into a crackerjack encyclopedic reference and research starting point on all things maritime, as well as a financial success that will help finance development of new services addressing under served maritime information needs. 

 

 You, our visitors are the most important part of these developments. We deliberately chose the blog format for the "Books" operation so that we could communicate with our potential readers as we evolved the service, before formalizing the format into a web site. We would greatly appreciate your comments on the new formatting of the News Service in the comments section provided at the end of the News Service scroll. Suggestions are most welcome.