Rust Valley

I awoke this morning to find that Renesys, the company I work for, is featured in a business brief on the front page of the Business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. They probably have no idea that anyone from Renesys lives and works in Pittsburgh.

The coverage is due to the what I mentioned last night: my colleague Martin A. Brown produced an excellent writeup, using Renesys routing data, showing widespread power outages in the Ohio River Valley due to damage from hurricane Ike. So that’s news.

But the meta story here is one of the enduring power of the AP. Renesys has had lots of press over the years. I’ve been quoted for articles in the New York Times, Business Week, the Economist, the Washington Post and a long list of others. But I can tell you with certainty that *nothing* distributes a news story like getting cited in the AP.

In this age of democratized news authorship and distribution (learn more about all of that at Podcamp Pittsburgh next month), we like to delude ourselves with our cute little blogs and our social news sites into believing that we are somehow replacing the established infrastructure. We are nowhere near that. I’ve had stories slashdotted, reddited, dugg and AP‘d. The AP is the clear winner in reach and influence. It’s not even close. It will be interesting to see how and whether that changes.