12.28
This last Sunday (the 23rd), some neighbors down the street awoke at 2:00 am to their house on fire. I’m happy to say they all survived, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s about how this story was handled by the Sacramento Bee’s web site, sacbee.com.
The story is here.
2:00 am on Sunday is well after press time but the Bee did post a “breaking news” update to its web site at 9:25 am on Monday. Yeah, that’s right, on Monday. For those counting that’s over 24 freakin’ hours later. That ain’t “breaking” news folks.
Whatever, lets just go with it. I first saw the story in my RSS feed reader on Monday morning (hey, it was less than a half a mile from my house so I guess I missed it too) and clicked on it. While it was a good story, the very first question I had was “where did this happen?” I looked for a map on the page but there was no map to be found. How could you have a story today with a story like that and not have a map? Maps have become web journalism 101. The story was apparently updated 4 times that day and yet no map.
Then I wondered, where were the photos? Ok, you missed the 2:00 am alarm, no problem there, I’ve done that. But where was the photo of the burned out house with the people going through it? Cliché you say? Well so are stories about house fires before Christmas.
No map, no photos. It was a good story but it was over 24 hours old. To me it was a missed opportunity to actually put breaking news online and really use the web to help tell the story.
Then they made it worse.
The print version came through with the “firefighter’s gifts” angle in the next day’s paper (now two days on). It was essentially the same story but with a different hed. Owing to a quirk in the Bee’s workflow the print version superseded the “breaking news” web version rendering those links as 404s. Had there been user comments (I don’t know if there were) or any other webification, that would have been lost too. Ouch.
Still no map, still no photos. And what was a good story the day before hadn’t really been updated so now it was closer to mediocre. “Yeah,” a reader would be tempted to say, “I read about all that yesterday, so what else is new?” Funny thing about the web, users expect stories to update.
I want newspapers to succeed, I really do. But you can’t say you embrace the web and pledge yourself to “hyper-local” reporting and then phone in your stories like this. You have to make the stories work on the web and this means adding whatever the web can support to help tell the story. In this case it meant maps, photos, updating the story as you learn more and not killing links to the story because it appeared in print two days later.
It was a missed opportunity.
