MONDAY, APRIL 30, 2007
Blogging Breaking News: When a Big Story Happens in Your Backyard
Among the feedback to last week's
post about the marriage of the inverted pyramid and blogging was an e-mail from
Roanoke (Va.) Times reporter Mike Gangloff
. Normally, he wrote in the e-mail, he spends his days covering the federal court, but after the shootings at Virginia Tech, his assignment changed.
"I was the coordinator for the updates for the first two days of coverage," Gangloff wrote. "Much of my role was to be a rewrite man, taking notes from reporters (or sometimes from TV broadcasts of press conferences) and turning it into instant copy. I tried to play with different styles, partly to give our readers some variation and partly because different reporters headed in different directions in their collection of info."
Here are some of the other lessons Gangloff gleaned from the experience of blogging breaking news. (Gangloff's comments and examples are indented.)
SPEED COUNTS
First, of course, is to get info out as quickly as possible. The Web frees us from our print publishing schedule. It lets us compete with our television and radio (and blog and Facebook and Wikipedia and whatever else) counterparts in up-to-the-moment accounts, while preserving (and I'll argue, assisting) our newspaper advantage of time and space to dig into stories. We can gather string for print stories, let reporters write what amount to early drafts of print stories -- drafts that sometimes generate new comments and leads -- and by otherwise augmenting print coverage).
LOCAL AND LINKS REIGN
Second, we know our community better than other media outlets, and I want our online presentation to reflect this -- to not only give the latest breaking news, but a local sense of that news and how it impacts the community. Our mix includes everything from schedule changes to scene pieces. It's important to get the voices of regular people, not just victims, officials and spokespeople, into our coverage. Multimedia also is a big part of our presentation, so we try to tie video, slideshows and audio into the succession of breaking pieces. And we try to link to our other content as explicitly as possible, whether it be the periodically updated write-through story on the Virginia Tech shootings, or a previously published profile of a victim. Creating the right links, and especially the right language around them, is tricky on the fly but keeps readers who are new to the site and to the breaking news account from feeling completely out to sea.
LEARN FROM THE PAST
Like many newsrooms that break new ground, especially with a breaking story, previous experience plays an important role.
In 1997, the staff of
Newsday won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting for its coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800 into Long Island Sound the previous July. Miriam Pawel, an editor who helped supervise the team, said another breaking story the previous summer -- brush fires that threatened their community -- led to planning disaster coverage that paid off the night of the plane crash.
That was also the situation in Roanoke, Gangloff said. "The paper's style of online updates is something we developed last fall as we covered the
manhunt for an accused double murderer (also an event that spilled onto Tech campus)."
BLOGGING'S DIFFERENT STROKESA breaking-news blog relies on several categories where content determines each post, Gangloff said.
Among them, with excerpts from the manhunt story the year before:
1. Straightforward breaking-news updates
UPDATED 3:50 p.m.
Police say they have captured William Morva in woods near rugby and lacrosse fields on Blacksburg's Tech Center Drive. They say they have recovered a weapon believed to have been used in the shooting this morning of Montgomery County Sheriff's Deputy Eric E. Sutphin and the shooting early Sunday morning of Derrick McFarland, a security guard at Montgomery Regional Hospital. Both Sutphin and McFarland died....
2. Local angles that may be tangential to the breaking event's main storyline, but add community context and just interesting info to our overall account
UPDATED 5:57 p.m.
Before he landed on national news Web sites, accused double murderer William Morva was already notorious on the downtown Blacksburg scene.
Known for refusing to wear shoes, and not having a job, he is described by former neighbor Anthony Seay as "nice, but weird."
3. Scene pieces that show how different parts of the community are reacting.
UPDATED 3:19 p.m.
Traffic in downtown Blacksburg is returning to a normal pace. The police blockades at College Avenue and North Main Street remain, but Draper Road is open with no signs of the earlier mayhem -- except for the gathering of television stations microwave trucks in the municipal parking lot. Drivers ignored a "road closed" sign pushed to the side of the road at Draper and Roanoke Street.
4. Schedule changes and official statements, which are more or less bulletin board items, though we tend not to run these sorts of sometimes-long-winded official statements in full; sometimes we'll link to a complete statement posted elsewhere on our site.
UPDATED 1 p.m.
Gov. Tim Kaine has issued a statement condemning the killing of Montgomery County Sheriff's Deputy Eric E. Sutphin this morning.
"Corporal Eric Sutphin exemplified the highest traditions of law enforcement, and his 13-years of service with the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department saw countless acts of courage and bravery," Kaine wrote.
Coming up tomorrow: Lessons Learned from the Field -- A Q&A with Roanoke Times reporter Greg Esposito
Posted at 5:30:41 PM
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