The Independent Blog

Posted by The Independent on December 10th, 2007 in Newsroom, Website

There’s been a lot of news around here lately. Some good, some break-your-heart horrible. It’s hard to know how to talk about a newsroom’s reaction and plans for covering events like the shootings in Omaha without sounding like I don’t care about what happened in Omaha. But as a newspaper, we must make plans for coverage when news breaks.

How can we be reactive and get the most accurate info to our readers as quickly as possible? Via the web, of course. But newspapers in general can be slow to utilize this valuable tool. The industry seems so ingrained in its normal print news cycle that it can be hard to change a culture in the newsroom. Just to be clear, I’m speaking in general terms, not about The Independent, because I think,as a whole, we “get it.”

A story like the shootings is one of immediacy (and accuracy of course, but I’m not talking about sensationalism in journalism.) Without the web, newspapers can get left behind while we put everything together and get the story out there the next day. Meanwhile, TV and radio have been regurgitating the story ad infinitum for several hours.

And so we work hard to provide the tools to the newsroom that allows them to get important information on the web as soon as possible after a story breaks. We scramble to get our videographers out there to provide visuals to enhance the story that our reporters work on for print the following day. We may still have to wait to get the story onto paper (the benefit of this being more time to put together accurate information) but we will always strive to have the latest updates on the web no matter where we are in our news cycle.