Craig Silverman
Nov. 1, 2012
7:41 am
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Jeff Sonderman
Nov. 1, 2012
7:15 am
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 31, 2012
3:37 pm
Reuters |
Salon
What makes humans "
hunger for more disaster and mayhem," Jack Shafer asks, looking at how we greedily lapped up every jot and tittle about Hurricane Sandy this week. "Television and the Web," Shafer writes, "place us in the comfortable zone between too-far-away-to-feel-the-rush and I’m-so-damned-close-I-got-splattered-with-blood." Had the Washington-area resident's house not lost power, he says,
the media buzz I got last night from the Hurricane Sandy coverage could have kept me up for hours beyond my usual bedtime. Had my electric power been restored by morning, I don’t have to tell you what my first act would have been upon awakening.
That "disaster porn" has a byproduct, writes Laura Miller:
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Julie Moos
Oct. 31, 2012
3:26 pm
The New York Post briefly published a story this afternoon saying that
Mayor Mike Bloomberg was about to ban passenger cars from the city. The story read:
Mayor Bloomberg will announce later today that passenger cars will be temporarily barred from entering Manhattan, as New York struggles to recover from Hurricane Sandy, City Hall sources told The Post.
Bloomberg will reveal details of the restriction at a press briefing shortly.
The ban will be similar to travel restrictions enforced shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, sources said.
The misinformation spread widely on Twitter before being debunked by the Mayor's Office.
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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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Julie Moos
Oct. 31, 2012
8:43 am
The images from Hurricane Sandy have been frightening and moving as they flash across our screens. This week's front pages have made those images stand still. They reveal how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. A selection of today's 20 most interesting fronts appears below. How many ways are there to say "devastated"? You'll see. Pages appear
courtesy of the Newseum, some have been cropped to remove ads.
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- Front page appears courtesy of the Newseum.
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 31, 2012
8:41 am
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 31, 2012
7:39 am
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 30, 2012
4:07 pm
As Brian Lehrer hosted
WNYC's coverage of Hurricane Sandy Monday night in New York City, what stood out, he says by phone, were "the eye-popping, outsized numbers that were coming in that I could hardly believe and had to do a double take before putting them on the air." Such as the 100 mile-per-hour gusts closing the Triborough Bridge -- "that’s not a figure you hear with respect to wind in New York City," Lehrer says.
Lehrer, 60, has hosted a show on WNYC since 1989. Since Sunday he's been camping out in Lower Manhattan near the station's studio. His usual two-hour morning show was extended to three hours Monday, and he co-anchored the station's special coverage during the storm Monday night. Tuesday morning he was back on for three hours; he's looking forward to getting back to his house at Manhattan's northern tip this afternoon. WNYC's offices -- which also house classical station WQXR and New Jersey Public Radio -- are operating on generator power now.
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Oct. 30, 2012
1:52 pm
BuzzFeed says it has identified the person behind @ComfortablySmug, the Twitter account that spread misinformation about the New York Stock Exchange being under more than 3 feet of water. The writer's name is Shashank Tripathi, Jack Stuef reports, and he's a campaign manager for Christopher Wight, the Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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