Covering A Story the 21st Century Way

It's so old school, so 20th century, so "journalistic" to insist that you have to be at the site of a news event, maybe even talk to the participants, before you can report on the story. Thank goodness for Anderson Cooper, who understands that you can report on a story before you've done anything more than catch the car from the airport into the city that will be your dateline du jour (or nuit). Case in point: Cooper's ballyhooed (by CNN) return to New Orleans. Apart from his peculiar, not to say unique, way of pronouncing the city's name, notice that he reports on the mood of New Orleans from the remarkable vantage point of a car ride from the airport into town. Notice also that, unlike every news report on the shooting of Helen Hill to date, Cooper has information that identifies the shooter as a "burglar". Perhaps he got that information from his car's Magellan.