Technology continues to force evolution in the news business no matter which end of the story you’re on. TV journalists armed with small cameras and laptop computer equipment are going places and reporting stories they never could with their clunky old equipment. And back home, at their computers, news consumers have “news aggregators” that turn their desktops into “a voracious media hub.”

USA Today writer Peter Johnson worries that the convenience of a one-person TV crew, now able to slip easily into a hot war zone “where space is limited and access is tightly controlled,” may obscure the priority of journalists’ safety. But there is no doubt that for networks looking to cut costs, the new advanced technology is cheap and effective, he writes.

“I can feed a story or do live shots from pretty much anywhere in the world,” said CNN correspondent Keven Sites, who recently talked live to journalists after their capture and release in Bogota, Columbia. According to MSNBC correspondent Bob Arnot, it can be done for a quarter of the cost to send a crew.

Going it alone as a TV reporter also promotes a “level of intimacy” with the person being interviewed, a characteristic often lost with the old-fashioned full TV crew, says CNN Correspondent Nic Robertson. Robertson said he was also able to slip in and file reports from the West Bank town of Ramallah while it was locked down last year all because he wasn’t using a “whole big production” that might have called attention to him and gotten him kicked out.

There are drawbacks though, says Arnot. When he recently interviewed Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the “one-man band” style of television reporting required that Arnot set up his own camera and tripod and clip the microphone on Saleh. Saleh and his aids claimed the process was “not very professional,” Arnot said.

While TV reporting is becoming increasingly flexible, so is the process of finding relevant news. Little software programs called news aggregators or news readers now allow info junkies to “snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN,” writes J.D. Lasica, senior editor for Online Journalism Review.

According to Lasica, the programs are just now moving out of the techie world and into the mainstream. Download one (many are freeware), install and launch it, and immediately you have access to headlines from news organizations, web logs, your favorite online writers, etc., without having to visit every web site individually. Choose the channels you wish to subscribe to, and start scanning headlines from news organizations such as The New York Times, the BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. Want the full story? Click a link and your browser takes you to the appropriate web location.

But wide-ranging access and customization aren’t the only benefits of news reader programs. Scott Hacker, webmaster for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, likens the programs to TiVo because they avoid online advertising in all its forms, banners, pop ups and pop unders.

“(I)t lets me spend the same amount of time to take in a lot more media. For me, it’s about speed, it’s about saving time. I’m able to distill information much more efficiently, Hacker said.

The programs greatly increase interactivity because they “propel users into an immediate online dialogue, whether through emails, discussion boards or blog entries,” Lasica says. “But perhaps the biggest potential impact of news readers is the prospect that they will further level the playing field between Big Media and individual content creators.”