Old media, "new" media and weathering the storm
In the old days, when a tornado spun through the region at midnight or thereabouts, newspapers were a journalistic casualty. Because of deadlines, you can't get much of anything into the next day's paper. Your first real coverage comes 36 hours after the storm strikes. I've lived through those days, and I felt forlorn because of the missed opportunity. Big news happens in your town, and you are dead in the water.
No longer.
Now, the worst timing for a newspaper is the best timing for the newspaper Web site. When the tornado struck Guilford County Friday morning, we didn't get anything in the newspaper, but we posted what we knew until about 2 a.m. Friday and started up again at about 5:45 a.m. Reporters and photographers posted news updates, victims' stories, photos and maps throughout the day and into Friday evening. John Newsom, our main online reporter, Twittered.
Meanwhile, because so much had already been written and posted, we could plan the next day's newspaper with much more information than we usually have. We knew exactly what sort of information and visuals we had. We watched television to determine what people already knew and didn't know. We focused our newspaper coverage on giving them new information, providing perspective on how the storm formed and where it went, and showing photographs.
In the end -- now that we have more than one method of news distribution -- it worked out well for both the newspaper and the Web site. (Putting aside the death and destruction of the storm itself.) Had the storm hit an hour earlier, we would have gotten a story into the Friday newspaper and patted ourselves on the back for our hustle. I wish we could have. But, to be honest, I know it probably would have been out of date the moment it landed on driveways Friday morning.
If there are any journalists left out there who don't understand or appreciate the value of taking your journalism digital -- where people can get it even if the paper isn't scheduled to be delivered for 24 hours -- then our experience Friday should be a lesson to them. Readers seemed to appreciate it, too.
Comments (2)
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Even with the online component, "print" media doesn't challenge "broadcast" media for immediacy or visual impact. Where print continues to dominate, both online and in traditional outlets, is in depth of coverage and analysis. Broadcast is headline driven, but dries up quickly. What I look for in print is analysis of the event. How effective was the response? What do we learn? How do we put these learnings into effective practice?
Because broadcast media is horribly distractable, it only rarely has any hope of doing what print media can do as a matter of course. Consider, for example, that ABCNews considers a 2-minute segment to be "A closer look" at some large issue.
Even the news / issues shows (i.e. MSNBC's Countdown) don't effectively (and consistently) take shows or stories into depth online - the online segment simply links to a video of the on-air segment.
So, while the N&R may have effectively kept up with the weather story online, it was essentially mimicking broadcast media to a very narrow audience. 36 hours later, while the broadcast media were continuing to revel in their pictures and surface stories, the N&R had the opportunity to begin analysing the county emergency reponse plan; digging into the failures which led to injuries; estimating the economic impact; discussing the state and federal economic response; etc - all "wonky" stories that need telling, but don't lend themselves to 2-minute treatments with graphics and exciting footage.
Posted on May 13, 2008 3:22 PM
"...it was essentially mimicking broadcast media..."
Unless your cable went out and you get the paper's RSS on your smartphone...
Posted on May 13, 2008 8:37 PM