My radar screen has a new blip. Does yours?

Today, Google announced a new service. It did not appear on most people's radar screen. It was a blip on mine. I read it with interest. I considered it another nail in the coffin of commercial news services like AP and even the TV news.

Other nails are the Brian Williams fiasco, which he attributed to his out of control ego, the 2015 announcement by Tim Cook that Apple is at the forefront of a new era in media, and the Medium is the Message announcement by Marshall McLuhan approximately 5 decades ago. I did reach back a bit  for that nail.

What was the blip? Google announced a new dedicated news channel for unaltered videos made from eyewitnesses to major events. It is called the YouTube News Wire. The Google news wire sounds a lot to me like the AP news wire of old without the editors/

Steve Jobs predicted it years ago when he forecast that people with iPhones would create real videos from real events that real people would really watch. The only minor item that bothered me about the Google news wire announcement was that it mentioned that Google had been testing an "Automated Formula" for the last few years to decide which of the thousands of eyewitness videos to feature. Two steps forward and one step back.