I know exactly how it might play out. Something big is breaking in your town. The phone tree is blazing as cells ring throughout the city. "Drop what you're doing. Get over to the square. I want you to call in every fifteen minutes. Chris is in charge of writing up your stuff. Are you on your way?"
Reporters and photographers are on heightened alert, trying to observe everything, senses piqued for every nuance, eyes darting to take in all they can.
Back at the newspaper office, your partner Chris is scouring the Internet to see who will get it up first. She can't write anything until you confirm what's going on. The blog is open, ready for the first information to float back from you.
In my last post I talked about the Oregonlive blog with breaking news. This blog sits at the ready for real breaking news when they need it. The newspaper uses it to post just about anything considered news throughout the day, weather, documents, photos, as long as it's news it might just show up on there.
Perhaps by posting just about anything that qualifies as news, the Oregonian is training me to expect this constant flow of information through its continuously updated scroll. Where do we, the journalists, want our readers to turn when a story breaks in our town? Do we want them to trust us to get them accurate information quickly?
Yes.
While I would have expected that when the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, the Star-Tribune had coverage on a breaking news blog, I can't seem to find one on their Web site. They have plenty of special interest blogs though. You also have to pay for their archives, which are anything older than 14 days.
I think I will save that discussion for a different post. Archives should be free.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
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The bridge collapse is an interesting case. I'm not sure if there's a blog either, but this summer, I edited just about every story the Star-Tribune did on this, as it's a McClatchy paper. It was the closest thing possible to being in that news room for the event. The difference is that those of us in D.C. were fairly confident that we didn't know anyone who would have been on the bridge.
That was one of those days in the newsroom. It was painfully slow, and we'd been saying so all day. There's kind of a jinx on saying that it's a slow news day. It reminds me of an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" where someone said "it's slow" and suddenly, there was a ferry crash with hundreds of victims. That day in the newsroom, we spent the day talking about how there was nothing to report on and no big stories to edit. Then, around 6 p.m., bridge collapse. For DAYS, I read every story and every update on the collapse, but I never did see any blogs.
While there isn't a breaking-news blog that I can find, the Star-Tribune did do this very cool interactive feature on the victims and survivors of the collapse . It's very cool/sad and you can click on visual representations of all the cars to find out what happened to the people inside.
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