March 8 2007
As much as we would like to think that wine blogs are upsetting the traditional media apple cart, there is still a ways to go before potential equates to influence.
Because of this (and because it’s sometimes good grist for the mill), I still read a lot of mainstream wine media. Just to keep up, you know.
But, where the monthly glossies are easier to keep track of, most syndicated weekly print columnists are a little bit more difficult to track down; not every news paper is on the RSS bandwagon, either. And, for precisely that reason, I signed up for the Wine Opinions “Wine Review Weekly.” It’s on a trial basis and I like what I see in the first issue.
What a handy little service—kind of like a public relations clip service or the News Coverage Index, except for wine.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has an influential weekly service—the News Coverage Index—where they summarize the broad news stories of the previous week. Each week the NCI collects and reviews coverage from top news organizations across five major sectors of the media: newspapers, network television, cable television, radio and the internet. Every Tuesday, the News Coverage Index is updated on PewResearch.org to identify the top stories covered by the media during the preceding Sunday through Friday.
Wine Opinions, a side project by John Gillespie from the Wine Market Council, strikes me as a project that might end up heading in that direction, except devoted to wine. It’s an interesting idea and one with merit—information consumption around wine is only growing commensurate with the amount of content available; that is to say there is plenty to go around.
Eventually somebody has to figure out how to keep track of all of this information. The difference between reading and knowledge is wisdom and that can only be had by experience, but in the interim, and just launched it should be noted, Wine Opinions keeps tracks of the major dailies and their wine columnists for wines tasted.
And, while I won’t even begin to broach the subject that Tyler Colman’s palate has more relevance to me, then, say, Bob Hosman from the South-Florida Sun Sentinel, I will say that having national columnists linked in an email digest is a handy little thing.
Unfortunately, I’m on a *free* trial subscription, open to anybody that responded to the Wines & Vines promo email, and I think regular priced subscriptions will be an incredibly outrageous price of $349 dollars annually. For an email. Priced, undoubtedly, like a clip service and not a wine enthusiast service. Did I mention that Wine Opinions creates no content of its own in this email digest?
Frankly, I’m torn because I like what I see, but not $349 dollars worth of like.
Check it out at the following link and weigh in with thoughts. Too much money for the price of convenience or incredible time-saver?
Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (2) |
Another important tip is to back up your important files. Backing up will give you something to return to in case of any mishaps or accidents, instead of having you go back all the way to square one and start from scratch. Back up your files regularly so you don’t have to go through the tedious chore of doing it in bulk. You can use removable drives or even burn data to CDs and DVDs.
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It’s a great service, and yeah, it’s expensive, but keep in mind that it isn’t pitched so much for winelovers as it is toward industry people, whose employers are picking up the tab.
(disclosure: i built the wineopinions website)