Air Fox

Hey, if your TV station's morning show is a little boring, then take a minute to head over the the newest digital gewgaw hatched by those folks at Chicago's Fox station, WFLD.

The folks that also are bringing you www.livenewscameras.com, which lets you watch scores of stations' unedited video feeds, now have a nifty site that lets you watch WFLD's news helicopter live as it goes about its business doing morning traffic reports (other times you get the "skyline" cam or, as a few minutes ago, someone having much too much fun playing with the joystick.)

Unfortunately, WFLD has chosen to go with Windows media streaming, which means there will be a few glitches for Mac users. First, remember you will need the Flip4Mac plug-in so that you can watch Windows media through Quicktime. And you'll get uneven performance with Mozilla browsers. It worked OK in Firefox and Safari but never came up in Seamonkey.

But risk-averse newsrooms everywhere could take a page from WFLD News Director Andrew Finlayson's playbook. As he wrote to me in an e-mail: We try to move fast...do it and improve it instead of having a lot of specs to satisfy ...