My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown
Four years ago, aggregating at Central Michigan Life was virtually unheard of.
Staff policy was fixed on reporters and editors doing the legwork themselves – as in, make the phone calls, cross-reference and analyze. Don’t base your reporting on another newspaper’s reporting. Every story at CM Life required 2-3 sources at least before it could even be considered for publication. That was just part of the learning process.
In these days of Web 2.0, things haven’t changed too much. We still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. But, in cases of breaking news on cm-life.com, especially in big statewide or nationwide stories, aggregation can be key.
Case in point:
Last week, at midnight Thursday (or Wednesday, depending on how you want to look at it), the Michigan government shut down for two hours because it could not finalize a temporary budget nor a final budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year. It was the second shutdown in the last three years for a state that, really, has one of the weakest economies in the country.
Unfortunately, our political reporter(s) weren’t on the story. But I took matters into my own hands (I apologize for the cliche).
The link above will take you to the final product of our coverage. But it started at about 12:15 a.m., when I posted one quick graph on the government shutting down. It linked to the Detroit Free Press story (link’s broken now):
“The state government is shut down as lawmakers could not agree on a state budget by midnight Thursday, according to the Detroit Free Press. Keep checking cm-life.com for more details as they unfold.”
Immediately after posting, I tweeted it, Facebooked it and told everybody to keep checking cm-life.com for updates.
Every update from here on out would be simply aggregation from the Detroit Free Press and other sources. I updated with the consequences of the shutdown, the latest developments, little details and, most importantly, more links. I tweeted every time there was a new update, particularly with the portion of the state budget that concerned students the most (the Michigan Promise scholarship to thousands of students).
This continued for about three hours, all the way until the end of the shutdown. I didn’t talk to one physical source- all information I got was from other reports.
The results?
- The story earned our site more than 500 hits on Oct. 1 (the morning it was posted/updated) and was retweeted eight times.
- Google News crawled our story and mixed it in with the other government shutdown stories on the Web.
- We had 12 comments, several in the early morning hours.
- Most importantly: We successfully informed our readers of the state government shutdown as it was happening and its impact on them (mainly college students with the Michigan Promise scholarship money).
Like I said, we still require reporters to get 2-3 sources for stories. Nothing replaces those connections. But the lesson here is this: Sometimes, when you have no sources to talk to, you just need to roll up your sleeves, do your duty of informing your readers and centralize the content other news organizations are getting. Even if you are mixing those links in with sources you’ve talked to.
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