Getting what you need to know tomorrow right today
Fire breaks out at school around 2 p.m. Students evacuate. Fire departments respond. Media descend. The story of the destruction of Eastern Guilford High School is shown live on television and told live on Web sites, including ours.
We're 10 hours from publishing the paper, but by 6:15 p.m. and certainly by the late news everyone* knows the sound bite: Eastern High School is engulfed by fire. No one is killed. Lots of questions remain.
For us, the questions are: What story do we report? How do we produce a paper that explains what happened, puts it into context and tells what's next? How do we advance what people already know? Asked more pointedly: How do we stay relevant in the new media environment?
Back in the day, even with online coverage, the day's paper reported what happened yesterday. The first sentence would have been something closer to this:
GIBSONVILLE -- A two-alarm blaze that started in the chemistry lab destroyed Eastern Guilford High School Wednesday afternoon. No one was killed, but two firefighters were taken to the hospital.
Everyone* already knew that, but that wouldn't have fazed us. That was then. Now we gauge what you already know and try to anticipate what you might need to know to start the day.
In this case, we used a photograph on the front page to communicate the idea that the school was lost. Our written coverage looked ahead on what we thought people wanted to know when they awoke today.
GIBSONVILLE -- Top county school officials had no definite plans Wednesday night on where to relocate more than 1,000 students from Eastern Guilford High School after an afternoon fire reduced the building to rubble.
"Those kids will not go back to school there this year, there's no question," county schools Superintendent Terry Grier said Wednesday evening. "Our primary goal is to try to keep the classes together as much as we can."
A long-term solution had not been decided by 9 p.m., when administrators, including several principals, ended discussions of available space at other local high schools. A schools spokeswoman said officials hope to finalize their plans by the end of the week.
First three paragraphs and we haven't told readers the cause of the fire, where it started, whether anyone was hurt, what it looked like, or used the word "blaze" or "inferno." (Yet another occasion in which my mentors in the business are wondering what in the Sam Hill has got into me. They use terms like Sam Hill.)
The difficulty of this approach in general comes when we must decide that a big news event at, say, 4 p.m. will be old news by the time the paper is delivered the next day at 6 a.m. Part of that is teaching old dogs like me new tricks. The larger issue, I think, is shaking off the adrenalin rush we get when we're chasing a great story to critically analyze whether that excitement will carry through to the reader in the morning. Sometimes it will -- a story suspended in time, almost as if it works 9-5 -- but most times, it won't.
Sometimes we guess right, sometimes not. I hope that we're guessing right more often than not. It is one of the things our future depends on.
* My wife went to Chapel Hill at 4 p.m. yesterday and returned late without watching or hearing the news. As a result, she first heard about the fire this morning. She didn't seem confused by our coverage.
Comments (1)
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John---
Isn't it interesting about our spouses. When I called home last night around 7:15 (after spending 4-1/2 hours straight in the studio without commercial breaks) and asked her if she had heard about the fire, she asked, "What fire?"
Posted on November 2, 2006 9:00 PM