As bullets fly, the Seattle Times tweets
The local three-day cop-killing drama shows that the local press, for all the angst, still has some newsroom chops.
By Chuck Taylor
December 03, 2009.
In the age of Twitter and streaming police radio communication, the bar for a newspaper is high when news breaks. Over the past couple of years we've come to see that crowd-sourced journalism is well suited to fast-breaking news. Thousands of eyes on the streets (or ears listening to the police scanner) can be a substitute for authoritative reporting — to a point, at least.
Meanwhile, among news outlets still practicing one-to-many journalism, television has long held the edge on timeliness, with helicopters and live pictures.
So when four Lakewood cops were slain in the Tacoma suburb of Parkland this week and a manhunt ensued, news junkies of course turned to Twitter to find out, to report, and to opine. The first person to report the apparent capture of fugitive Maurice Clemmons was a scanner-listener. Out in the real world, the helicopters were scrambled and the microwave masts were raised and press conferences were broadcast. A typical 21st century response to news.
But in the end — no, come to think of it, from the beginning — the story of four dead cops and one dead suspect was owned by our legacy ink-on-paper monolith, The Seattle Times. With as big a newsroom bureaucracy as they come around here, the Times turned a nimble double-play by providing deep reportage and super-timely alerts, many from the streets.
Well-crafted stories and an interactive timeline-map on the paper's website were supplemented by breathless updates on Twitter. And the tweets weren't always headlines linking to coverage at the Web site. Staffers including Executive Editor David Boardman were posting news as soon as they confirmed it, before there was anything to link to. That indicates a nuanced understanding — that for many people Twitter is as deep as they'll dive into the news, and that social media are distribution platforms for actual content and not merely ways to promote the main product.
So while a casual citizen journalist might have been first to report the shooting of Clemmons, it was the Times (and other established news outlets) that confirmed it at the scene, also via Twitter, and not long thereafter.
The Times also experimented with Google Wave, the real-time collaboration application that is seen by Google as the next iteration of email. With up to 500 people at a time weighing in with remarks on the Times-created "wave," it was hard to scan for relevant information, and I came to the conclusion that Wave was the wrong tool for the job. But good on them for trying it.
This was a huge brand-enhancing moment for the Times, which is teetering on the edge of the newspaper industry's fiscal cliff. Readers recognized the effort. Tweeted one: "Great work from @seattletimes covering the manhunt and shooting." People generally love to hate their local media, even though they get exactly the local media they deserve, but not so much this week.
It should be noted that The News Tribune of Tacoma — the shooting of the four police officers was in their back yard — provided noteworthy coverage, too. And SeattlePI.com did amazingly well considering how outnumbered that post-ink staff is. But the Times had them all outgunned, on the Web and in print.
Ten years ago, television owned live coverage of the seminal World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. TV is still a big player in bringing breaking news into our homes. But it's no longer the only platform of instantaneous dissemination. An ink-on-paper dinosaur has evolved.
Comments:
Posted Thu, Dec 3, 8:44 a.m. Inappropriate
Thank you, Mr. Taylor, for the accurate and thought-provoking analysis, far more intimately detailed than anything I might have put together but nevertheless confirming most of my impressions.
However if you do a follow-up, I would suggest one more question: by the bylines I noted, The News Tribune appears to have called in at least one reporter (and maybe two) for extra duty, and it might be revealing to ask whether this is true.
McClatchy busted the Guild there years ago and I'm told that means it's like the old days on a bad sweat-shopper: no overtime pay or comp time even if you work an 80-hour double-shift week, so the question is surely worth asking, if only to give TNT's underpaid and overworked reporters a little extra recognition for a job damn well done.
That said, I remain troubled by how today's members of the working press -- deliberately denied any familiarity with the principles of class struggle -- continue to regard the downsizing of mass media as an economic accident rather than what it is: the most recent phase of a long, methodical and ongoing effort by the Ruling Class to limit (and eventually terminate) our access to vital information.
Posted Thu, Dec 3, noon Inappropriate
Chuck, nice post. The Seattle Times reporting staff performed as the pros they are under truly tough conditions: chasing a complicated, breaking story as it shifted across the landscape, working alongside understandably edgy police made all the more nervous by the tips cascading in. Following their tweets and those of others as they rolled across the #Washooting site (sometimes hitting a-dozen-a-minute during high-tension moments) was like sitting alongside a TV chopper jockey, plugged in to the police scanner, watching a car chase unfold below.
It was crowdsourced news reporting at its best and worst. You were right there for sure, getting the story close up and in real time, but utterly without the context to sift the news from the bs. I hope, as they review their coverage, the various local news organizations recognize how critical it has become to insert an editor into the evolving digital process.
As a reporter, another thing that struck me about this story was how clearly it underscored the fragility of the print newspaper’s role these days. True, the Clemmons manhunt was a real-time news event,covered best by Twitter, TV or website. An hour after the police charged out of the empty house in Leschi, it was already a footnote. In the paper, the next day, it was background noise. In fact, Clemmons’ death itself was old news by the time it was in ink. Some newspaper executives hold that readers will once again flock to print papers for their news, but I think this story may help put that notion to rest. The long-term lesson here may be that as we all sat mesmerized following the Clemmons manhunt on Twitter, the news business rounded a corner and moved into the digital age for good.
Bill Richards
Posted Fri, Dec 4, 11:23 a.m. Inappropriate
Update: From TechNewsNow, here's a more encompassing, granular analysis of Seattle news outlets' use of social media to cover the story:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/68805.html
Posted Sat, Dec 5, 7:18 p.m. Inappropriate
I have heard--as a rumor right now (though supposedly based on a news story)--that Maurice Clemmons had a Twitter account and might have been listening in on the various 'tweets' indicating supposed sightings of the culprit and police movements in response. The same person who told me this rumor also speculated that Clemmons was able to use this information to help plan his drawn-out flight. The same source adds that if he were in the shoes of such a fugitive, he would definitely turn to this informational resource as a means of escape. All of which tends to dampen any enthusiasm that might greet the use of such reportage in similar situations.