When Local News Breaks—Fix It!

There are right ways and wrong ways to cover fast-breaking local news on the Web, and as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, washingtonpost.com is providing a good lesson in how not to cover a high-impact local story.

I'm generally reluctant to write about Post.com, because it's my alma mater and it's run by good friends of mine. But they're not having a good day. 

A serious line of thunderstorms swept through the Washington area a couple of hours ago, knocking down trees and power lines, and reportedly spawning tornados in the area. Local TV is all over the story, with a veteran local weatherman calling it one of the worst storms he's ever seen here. Local schools even locked down students until the storms passed.

But washingtonpost.com has been very, very slow off the mark. For a half hour after the storm, all the site had was a headline at the top of the home page linking to weather updates, even as TV was carrying the first reports of damage. The site has now put up a short staff-written story that's gradually being updated, but it's awfully basic, and not very helpful—it reports that a person was killed in the storm somewhere in suburban Fairfax County, but doesn't really say where. It glosses over the commuter problems and a storm-related shutdown of the Metro subway system, and barely mentions the tens of thousands of people without power. And not a word about the school lockdowns.

This is a scary storm that's disrupting the afternoon commute and has clearly caused a lot of damage (which TV is showing, of course). But the Post site seems all but unaware of its scope, and is handling it in old-media sorts of ways. 

Why not put up a news blog to provide fast-breaking developments? (Ironically, that's how the Post was covering the national political developments last night!) How about a map showing the path of the storm? (TV can do this in its sleep.) Why not put out a prominent call to readers for information, anecdotes, photos and videos? This is elementary stuff, and should be at the top of the playbook for a local media site dealing with a nearby disaster.

The New York Times gave a textbook lesson on breaking local coverage in last week's crane collapse, for which they used blogs, maps and user photos within minutes of the disaster—but Post.com seems unable to provide similarly sharp local coverage.

Of course, there is one place on the Post site that's provided live coverage of the storm: The well-hidden, ill-fated hyperlocal experiment, LoudounExtra.com, which is doing a great job with a staff-written news blog. It tracks the storm in that western suburban county and mentions the school lockdowns there. But none of that coverage is being integrated into the main site. What a wasted opportunity.

Post.com friends: This is a major, fast-moving local story, affecting millions of people in your primary coverage area. Many of them doubtless are checking the site (if they have power!) to find out what's going on around them. You've got to do better than this.

Addendum: I wasn't the only local washingtonpost.com reader frustrated by the site's storm coverage today. Scott Karp's good take is here.

Comments

[jackH]

publishing2.com (Scott Karp) didn't seem to publish my comment (or there just is a delay). So I post my disagreement here:

I completely disagree. How can you compare one newspaper site to the whole of the internet. Surely the result gotta be: One website won't give you as much as _all_ the rest.

And: Someone gotta produce the content. And the washington post is writing summaries for you to be up to date. It's not their aim to provide realtime data. Why could start that but they'll need further resources for that. And they've already got some type of content they are delivering.

And for anyone not living in washington the article by the washington post is much more the article I want to read. I'm not interested to read something that was about to happen the day after the day before yesterday. And I don't want to interpret a poweroutage map but just get a summary of the consequence plus some background on who's fault it is, whether it might happen again, what got lost. ...

[Edward Vielmetti]

I got all the news I needed from Twitter.