When story comments get interesting
Yesterday the Daily News reported on a three vehicle accident in the Valley that killed three people. Readers quickly started to post comments about it, and most were the standard this person’s an idiot etc etc, but it didn’t take too long for an industrious reader to run the driver through the public, online Alaska court records and post a link to his driving record.
Nothing too interesting turned up but it’s fascinating how quickly someone — not one of our reporters — posted the information on the Daily News site. We provided the name, which Troopers released to us as a media outlet, and the community carried on the the story.
I found it inspiring, but I think it also raises some potentially difficult questions for the paper.
January 21st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
So this seems to be the news cycle now. Even the NY Times has an in-house version of this, where its own stories are immediately commented upon by its bloggers, who in turn are commented upon by readers who are in turn commented on by other readers — the “long tail” of journalism.
Local media outlets are also featuring more and more primary news from non-professional journalists as well. Upload your video of a car crash and you might see it in the paper or on the evening news. The instant feedback loop is the quality check, and readers are less annoyed by mistakes in the first place, since there is infinite time to “chase” or update the story later.
The news outlet (newspaper, TV station, Web site) gets more and more free content, the viewers get more info, but what happens to the staff writers? Are they left selling buggy whips?
And since this wouldn’t be complete without a self-serving pingback to my own blog…
–Matt