AMERICAN ADMIRALTY BOOKS: A FEW WORDS ABOUT OUR NEWS SERVICE

 WE PROVIDE LINKS TO MARITIME

 NEWS SOURCES BUT ONLY RARELY ARE WE A  DIRECT REPORTER OF NEWS

   THE NEWS SERVICE 

Depicted above is the banner for our "NEWS SERVICE"special interest page. We recently devoted nearly two days of effort to bringing you the latest news from the Ukraine. Those of you who read us daily no doubt noticed that we warned the Ukrainian while there was still rioting in Kiev that there was a maritime dimension to the Ukraine situation and that the major party at interest was Russia. We described the maritime/ naval considerations and predicted a Russian invasion. We were reporting the first early arrivals of Russian troops by sea before the major news media reported anything, we were among the first to carry news of Russian truck convoys inbound. Once the professional news organizations finally realized that the invasion of the Crimea was underway we were busy linking our readers to up dates on the situation from professional media outlets from around the world. Now we have tapered  off on such coverage , did we lose interest? 

 No, basically while we have some unique informants, and retain some unusual analysts  which sometimes gives us advance knowledge of maritime events that the general media, and often the specialized maritime media, don't have, we are not interested in "scooping" anyone. When a story finally draws the coverage that we think it warrants from the professional news organizations we pretty much move on. We don't have the money or the manpower to run a professional news organization. During the several events of the past two years where we seemed to be the first with the story it was an accident of our highly specialized focus and resources and not any attempt at crackerjack journalism. We are in the business of providing initial maritime information, providing the identification of authoritative literature and back ground reading on any maritime subject , and links to providers of more specific information. We are in short an encyclopedic maritime information service.  We want to be the first site you turn to when starting to research any maritime subject.

 So why do we have a "NEWS SERVICE"? We don't have a "news service" in the traditional sense. What we have is a blog special interest page dedicated to maritime news sources. These days many merchant marine officers and marine transport operations managers start their work day working on a "voyage plan" which all too often requires planing for the avoidance of pirates. So the very first information sources listed in our "News Service" are links to internet sites that help track and assess the piracy risks around the world. After that we provide links to all of the top on line English language maritime news magazines like gCaptain, WORKBOAT, MARINE AND ENGINEERING NEWS to name just a few, followed by links to the official and unofficial sites dealing with the World's Coast Guards. Finally we post some "retained headlines of interest".

WATCH FOR GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE RETAINED HEADLINES OF INTEREST IN THE NEAR FUTURE THAT SHOULD BE OF SPECIAL INTEREST TO PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS, WRITERS AND GRAD STUDENTS WORKING ON PAPERS INVOLVING RECENT MARITIME EVENTS BUT NOT EXACTLY TODAY'S NEWS.  We have retained many such posts as you will now find by scrolling down from the last links to news magazines. At the moment a researcher may find among our selected retained headlines our comments and links to major maritime news stories of perhaps as far back as six months. However we are storing off line nearly two years of retained headlines and we store more every month. Eventually we will link our visitors to this virtual news feature morgue within the page we now call our "News Service". Thus, hopefully we will provide a useful free research tool in the near future for those interested in marine events that made the news since the start of our site. Such a researcher could shorten his or her's research just by clicking on our News Service and thus discover the links to all of the top maritime specialty reporting services and check to see if they have publicly available archives. But once we get our posting morgue up and organized such visitors could also search our archives and find links to stories from all sources, including general media sources as well as our own occasionally published analysis or comments. The American Admiralty Books News Service and our Admiralty Law and Authoritative Literature sections are planned to evolve into major research resources for legal and journalistic professionals. Check in at least weekly to monitor changes and help guide our efforts by submitting comments.

Thanks,

Johnas Presbyter, Editor