chile earthquake

Each of us have our media sources that we trust for information about certain topics.  In the U.S. and in many cases internationally, a few names come to mind such as ESPN for sports, TMZ for celebrity gossip, CNN for news, and the Wall Street Journal for business information.

With the earthquake in Chile- a country I lived in for four years- my first choice was to forgo the hours of analysis on CNN regarding the potential impact of the resulting 2-foot waves produced by the tsunami to find information directly from news sources in Chile.  Not so surprisingly, I found the largest Chilean newspaper El Mercurio’s website EMOL was down.   While I am not exactly sure which of the many legitimate causes (traffic, power outages, damage) were responsible, this highlights the challenges of finding reliable information from your country of origin or a country that you care about.

Outside of major occurrences, usually catastrophic or war-related, there is limited information available without accessing the country’s media publication.  For those who speak the language of the country this is not a major problem in the digital age; however for others,  blogs, Twitter, and Facebook have become a source of information.  While very useful, I for one rely on and hope to continue to rely on the journalists that make up local news sources from every city or country.