good work: the silver lining
The news coming out of my alma mater today certainly wasn't good news: ASU officials said a male graduate student shot and killed himself in front of a professor inside a Tempe campus building.
But I was glad to see that The State Press was all over the breaking news story. From the looks of things here in Southern California, it appears that TSP did almost everything right.
They sent quick, frequent and pertinent updates over Twitter while gathering info for a Web story that they then updated throughout the afternoon. They also attempted to crowdsource through Twitter and even apparently offered live video coverage. (I was away from my laptop at the time, and I wasn't able to watch on my iPhone.)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what a 21st century newspaper looks like. It reports the news as it's happening, and it does so fully — i.e., without teasing to the next day's print edition. In so doing, it pushes out information over multiple channels as appropriate — short updates and refers over Twitter, a full story on the Web and (I presume) video when there's something to see and hear.
Today's reporting from The State Press didn't chronicle good news, but it was good work.
Thanks, Brian! For stories like this, it's hard to feel good about doing a good job, but the response we've gotten at least lets us know we've done it right.
I can also say that though the phone number Tweet didn't get much response, Twitter and Facebook helped us get in touch with a lot of people on the scene at the time
Adam Sneed | 10/26/2009 23:04