One of the most critical parts of our job at Central Michigan Life is breaking news.
We print three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday – which means we spend Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the office. So breaking news on those days is relatively easy. Everyone is in the newsroom to plan a course of action, including several reporters standing at the call.
But what about the off days?
Our fall 2009 staff faced its first test last week, when chemical exposure forced students, faculty and staff out of the Dow Science Complex early Friday. The university, after months of testing, finally made use of its Central Alert system to notify all classrooms and students subscribed to the alert service. That was our first whiff of the incident – the morning after a long production day, when much of the staff is tending to classes and other non-work related things.
Here is how we broke the story:
1) Getting a reporter and photographer to the scene.
A couple of our editors, including our managing editor, Dave, were in class when they received the alert at 10:44 a.m. They immediately made some phone calls and reached one of our senior reporters, Jake May, who agreed to head to Dow as soon as possible. They also called our photo editor, Ashley, who proceeded to make calls herself, and got at least one photographer to the scene.
But the beauty of a campus newspaper is this: While nobody is all that easily on call on non-production days, there are still reporters and photographers on campus going to class, staying in residence halls and so on. This means when city fire and police officials, along with a HAZMAT team, are sitting outside a building, we have reporters and photographers taking initiative, making phone calls, talking to people and getting right to work. We had at least one of each doing so in this particular case. A campus newspaper editor’s dream.
But while all this was going on…
2) While sending people out, posting the story online and spreading the word.
This part is critical. Central Michigan Life’s specialty will always be getting the in-depth story and providing coverage nobody else can. But when breaking news happens, readers expect you to be on top of it, even when a campus alert system beats you to the punch (which is expected, in this case). So while we have people working on the in-depth story, we had to get something online quick. We posted what we knew, making sure all the information was verified (from the alert itself). A good idea, too, although I don’t think we exercised this with the Dow story: tell your reporter to call with bits and pieces when they have the time, or have a second reporter go out for the sole purpose of doing this.
Don’t stop there, either. Take advantage of your social media crowd. Tweet it. Throw it on Facebook, if you can. Tell them to keep updated on your Web site.
We kept on top of it as much as possible until the main reporter, Jake, left the scene to compile the story. Then…
3) Breaking the story little by little with online story updates and Tweets.
We didn’t just wait for our reporter to have the full story typed before updating. Ideally, we want to train readers to check our site as much as possible when a story is breaking.
How to do that? Breaking bits a pieces of the story online with constant updating. Once the first five graphs or so are typed, edit and post. Once five more are done, edit and post again. We used Twitter to our advantage throughout, as well. A later campus alert told us to call CMU Police if we left stuff in the building. We tweeted that information right away and got it right into the story.
4. Now that the story is posted and developed, getting multimedia online.
While all this was happening, we had at least two photographers return to our office to upload photos. Ashley was in the newsroom looking through them and taking two select photos to throw into the story. This allowed us to put our story in the “Featured” slideshow area, the most prominent story area on our site.
In the meantime, our photo staff was compiling a slideshow and, when campus announced a small press conference outside the building with an update to the status of the building (at the time, it was set to close until Monday), we sent Jake, who had his story updated and posted, and gave a video camera to our managing editor to put together a video presentation. We spent the rest of the afternoon getting those on the Web, then tweeting and linking to them.
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And that’s all she wrote. We broke the story, developed it, Tweeted/Facebooked it and put together several presentations of the story (slideshow and video) within one day.
We also had an update Monday, explaining the use of the Central Alert system which, prior to that day, was not used outside of testing.
All of this might seem like standard operating procedure for any college paper, but the trick to this was fully covering all angles of this on what is normally an off day for CM Life staff. You can’t teach passion in journalism and, sometimes, that’s what it takes to get people rolling on a big story that comes up.
We could’ve easily wrote the story, edited it, posted it and left it at that. But our staff kept thinking of ways to cover this story outside of standard reporting. The slideshow and video gave us those options. It’s constantly thinking outside the box that separates a great college newsroom from a good one.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at September 4, 2009
Journalism, Social Media