Al Tompkins
May 22, 2013
11:55 am
In 42 years of Oklahoma City weathercasting, KWTV’s Gary England estimates he has tracked more than 1,000 tornadoes, and without a doubt, that estimate is “on the low end.” When he started his TV career in 1972, he wrote on … Read more
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May 21, 2013
10:40 am
AP photographer Sue Ogrocki talks about photographing children at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday.
In the 30 minutes that I was outside the destroyed school, I photographed about a dozen children pulled from the rubble.
I focused my lens on each one of them. Some looked dazed. Some cried. Others seemed terrified.
But they were alive.
I know that some students were among those who died in the tornado, but for a moment, there was hope in the devastation.
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Sue Ogrocki, Associated Press
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Jason Fry
Apr. 16, 2013
12:20 pm
Terrible events such as yesterday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon have always meant “all hands on deck” for news organizations, with staffers pulled off their regular beats to contribute.
But the endpoint of the newsgathering and reporting is no longer … Read more
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 1, 2013
6:45 am
A lot has changed in the decade since
Dr. Scott Lieberman captured an iconic shot of Space Shuttle Columbia breaking apart on Feb. 1, 2003. The 6-megapixel digital camera he used to capture the shot was a curiosity then -- he'd had to order it from a Canadian distributor because he couldn't find one in the U.S. To get the photo out to the world, he had to drive the file to the office of
his local newspaper. And since then, of course, the United States
stopped flying space shuttles.
Lieberman has picked up a sideline to his interventional cardiology practice in the decade since the disaster. He's an independent contract contributor to the Associated Press now, with hundreds of photos carrying his credit.
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Jeff Sonderman
Dec. 17, 2012
3:15 pm
Any journalist who’s had to ask grieving loved ones for an interview in the wake of a tragedy will tell you, it’s one of the hardest parts of her job.
It’s also one of the most difficult requests for non-journalists … Read more
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Jeff Sonderman
Oct. 31, 2012
11:03 am
BuzzFeed's website went offline Monday night (as did other news sites
like Huffington Post and Gawker) when the data center housing its servers flooded. Pando Daily's David Holmes talked to BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith about
how the site responded -- switching all publishing over to Tumblrs as a stopgap while rebuilding its own site, from scratch.
Just three developers worked throughout most the night to get Buzzfeed.com back up and running [in the cloud on Amazon Web Services]. One of them, Eugene Ventimiglia, kept working even after a tree fell through the roof of his home in North New Jersey.
“It took years to build (Buzzfeed) and they rebuilt it in six hours,” Smith said.
Of course, AWS cloud hosting has had its own failures when
weather or
power outages affected its server farms in Northern Virginia. So it's probably smart for news orgs to have layers of backup plans.
There can often be a virtual wall between the editorial side and technology side of a news organization. Newsroom editors may need to start asking more questions about their site's technology setup. How and where is our website hosted? How is data backed up? How would it be restored, how long would that take and what would it look like as that process was under way? Are there redundancies in case one part fails?
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 17, 2012
3:45 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 9, 2012
2:31 pm
Kentucky.com
This week's Licking Valley Courier came out a day later than usual, but the West Liberty, Ky., paper had a pretty good reason: Its offices, and the house of publisher Earl Kinner,
were destroyed by a tornado Friday that
left five dead. Kinner was rescued and, once in a shelter, he and reporter Miranda M. Cantrell began interviewing other people who had survived the twister. The Courier
joined Facebook on Tuesday and began publishing pictures of the storm damage in West Liberty and news about disaster relief. The Mount Sterling Advocate, headquartered 49 miles away in Mount Sterling, printed this week's special tornado print edition.
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Steve Myers
Feb. 14, 2012
7:07 am
A couple of tweets, discovered well after we all learned that Whitney Houston had died Saturday, illustrate a challenge journalists face in a breaking news situation. How do we find key sources, particularly eyewitnesses, in those first minutes and hours … Read more
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Steve Myers
Dec. 8, 2011
1:37 pm
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