photo courtesy http://www.photojunkie.ca/
About two hours before this morning’s grey dawn, a series of explosions tore through a propane depot in the northwest corner of the city, shaking buildings and homes, shattering windows and waking people as far as 10 kms distant from the scene. Fire and smoke shot to heights equal to a 20 or 30 storey building and led many to think (worry? fear?) that a jet airliner had crashed, a terrorist attack had taken place, the city was being bombed.
This was breaking news with a capital ‘B’ and at this point, six hours distant from that 3:30 am blast, it offers some intriguing lessons in how coverage of these events is evolving in a world where digital cameras and web access are almost ubiquitous.
Bottom line – in aggregate, citizens journalists out-performed their professional counterparts getting news out faster, offering more details, and better images and videos. They also made more mistakes and had a high noise to signal ratio. Mainstream media were slow off the mark and while they depended on the citizen journalists, they failed to make the most of the possibilities that material offered. See the bottom of the post for my thoughts on how to do that.
Toronto’s a media-rich city: four paid dailies, two free dailies, several city news blogs in addtion to more than a dozen local radio and television stations. I can’t cover them all, but took a look at the four dailies (The Globe, The National Post, The Star, and The Sun) and the two big place blogs (Blog.TO and Torontoist).
I did a similar comparison earlier this year (when the transit union launched an unexpected, but legal, strike on a Friday night at press deadline time) and the results are pretty similar – none of the dailies have figured out yet how to blend the strengths of their newsroom (speed, accuracy, access) with the new possibilities opened up by an always connected citizenry – but most of them are trying.
The Star, with the city’s biggest newsroom (although I can’t imagine they had more than a single person on duty when the first blast hit), produced the fullest account, with pretty admirable speed. Police, fire, eyewitness reports, plus links to two of the eight or so citizen videos of the blast I found online. The article had commenting enabled (they don’t always) and you got a bit of a flavour of the impact on the city, which is useful, if basic.
The Globe and Mail seemed entirely asleep at the switch, relying entirely on Canadian Press for it’s text story, still photos and video. (CP’s video was quite good actually, blending citizen video with their own images and overlaying professional reporting and a very competent voice-over.) The Globe (and the Star) both appealed to readers to send them stories, videos and photos, but if they got any, neither acknowledged it.) Lots of comments, though, including people offering links to other sites with video of the blasts, the Toronto Fire Dept’s live response web page, even academic and news references to other propane explosions and the risks the storage depots pose. Good stuff that a smart web team might have referenced in the story – but their readers did it for them. It’s a stark demonstration of how people use — or want to use — the web: to share information, to learn more by sharing what they know, using the familiar web tools Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, the collective memory of the web itself.
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