For many journalists, including myself, Sunday held the promise of a relatively quiet day. That calm was shattered by an e-mail message from The New York Times:
Sunday, December 14, 2003 -- 6:53 AM ET
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Iraq Governing Council Says Saddam Hussein Has Been Captured
Although television sets were quickly turned on, so was my Web browser to see how news sites would be handling this breaking story.
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WEB SITE SNAPSHOTS |
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Web Site Snapshots
Want to see lots of sites? We have a large [4.7 meg] Flash file that shows more than 80 sites. Don't do this on a dial-up. Even broadband users might want to "right click" the link above and save the file to your computer.
How we did it
Poynter Online uses an automated tool designed by Multimedia Editor Larry Larsen that visits a list of sites. Once triggered, this program captures a screen image of the page and move on. We can capture more than 175 pages in about 30 minutes. This allows us to try to take a "snapshot" of how various sites are handling the same story at about the same time. The pages in this story were captured between 9:36 a.m. and 10:04 a.m. ET
--Howard Finberg | |
Much has been written about online as the medium that people turn to – after television – for in-depth coverage of a breaking story. However by 9 a.m. ET most of the breaking news was out and the broadcast television networks turned to their Sunday morning talk shows to move the story forward.
This is a classic opportunity for websites to move the story. Newspapers still have almost another 24 hours before they hit the doorsteps again. And while television is doing a great job, the story is tailor-made for the Web.
For those who got up late, hey, it's Sunday, the Web is the place to turn to for the most complete story. There are lots of angles on this story. Photos. Video. Background. And later in the morning, new stuff about how the capture happened.
The challenge, then, is how to show site visitors that you have organized the story for them. Here are a few examples I find compelling.
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Boston Globe's boston.com site |
The Boston Globe's www.boston.com site did a great job packing lots of links into the page. They also gave readers a visual icon to signal different type of content.
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The Fort Wayne Newspapers site uses the Knight Ridder Real Cities template |
The Knight Ridder network of sites provided a cleanly organized site of links, although their presentation ability is still hampered by their publishing template. For my taste, I think there is too much open space on the page, especially under the Saddam photo. Wasted opportunty space. The example here is from the
Fort Wayne Newspapers site,
www.fortwayne.com.
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The Minneapolis Star Tribune |
Although I was surprised that the
Minneapolis Star Tribune's www.startribune.com did not have a Saddam photo on the home page at 9:30 a.m ET, you can't fault them for collection of links to the story. In addition to audio for the story, they also have a link to a discussion area. By 11 a.m. there were already a dozen comments posted. And a photo of Saddam on the front.
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The Tacoma Tribune's tribnet.com |
While East Coast news operations had a time advantage with this story (news broke in the middle of the night in the West), I was struck by how much the Tacoma
News Tribune's site,
www.tribnet.com, had up when we checked. It was 4 a.m. PT when this story broke for the Tacoma newsroom.
It isn't just about the links
There is another aspect of this story that requires some careful attention by those running news websites: the photographs of Saddam released by the U.S. military. The bearded image of the former dictator is compelling. But it needs words to put it in context. So does the picture that was taken after he was shaved.
Yet, too many sites fail to add captions to these kinds of photographs. And while confusion might be fleeting and eliminated by reading the story, that misses the point. We know that readers look at photos and read captions. We should add clarity and context. Not confusion.
Here are some examples of how different sites handled photos:
The
Dallas Morning News,
www.dallasnews.com, did a one of the best jobs of showing the different photos of Saddam. They had the bearded and the shaved photos. They also had an earlier photo of to help put the images in context.
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Free Lance-Star's www.fredericksburg.com |
Less visually appealing, but just as journalistically successful was the
Free Lance-Star's,
www.fredericksburg.com. The
Free Lance-Star had both pictures and a text block that explains what the reader is seeing.
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Long Beach Press-Telegram, CA |
Less successful was the Long Beach
Press-Telegram,
www.press-telegram.com. The site used the same two photos as the
Free Lance-Star, but failed to explain to the reader what they were looking at. And while it doesn't cause a lot of confusion, I would err on the side that says: You can't assume the reader knows.
Do you want to see more sites? Poynter Online has compiled a collection of more 80 screen captures of website front pages from Sunday, Dec. 14, between 9:36 a.m. and 10:04 a.m. ET. The collection has a variety of news sites published by newspapers, television stations, and online organizations.
The website Snapshots are in a Flash file built by Robin Sloan that is quite large (4.7 megs). Don't click if you are are on a dial-up. Or "right click" on the link to save the file to your desktop.
Postscript
John Hawkinson, who is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sends along his e-mail alert from CNN that he received at 5:32 a.m. ET. Here's what that alert said:
U.S. forces capture a number of wanted Iraqis in Tikrit, possibly including former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials say. Identities still being confirmed.
We want to give credit where credit is due.
