The water’s fine

MSCNE created a simulated event today so that we could practice covering breaking news. In teams, we were supposed to swarm the scene and cover it with video, audio, still photography and whatever online efforts we can muster. The news “broke” at 1 p.m. and we were allowed to report until 2:30 p.m. Now we are working on content and have until 5 p.m. to update the blogs.

We were limited because they set up blogger.com sites for us to use, and disabled any customization. So basically the only capability we have is to post text, photos and embed other material – no RSS feeds. Our team met briefly before 1 p.m. and determined who would be responsible for what tasks. Most in my group (made up of 16 editors of the dailies represented at the conference) elected to stay in the “newsroom” to organize the coverage. I went out to take photographs, but I struggled to find visuals. In retrospect, I don’t know if that was the best way I could have contributed, but it was a skill I wanted to work on. If this were real, obviously I’d go with my strengths and let those with other strengths, such as photography, work on those.

My group is incredibly competitive, but I think a lot of the other groups are doing a lot more innovative things with their site than ours. Our group is sitting in the Drewry Room at Grady College where we have access to three desktops (with no photo/video/audio editing capabilities) and two laptops), when we could be in a lab with a computer for each of us and all sorts of tools to work on content. It strikes me as curmudgeonly, because in no way are we taking advantage of the resources we have. We’re very focused on getting the story and the reporting, and we do have interviews the other groups didn’t get, but that’s so old school.

I decided to text updates to Twitter, but only one other person knew what Twitter was, and no one was terribly interested in incorporating that into the site. I took photos and recorded audio and sent four updates, including one immediately after we heard the news as I ran out to the scene. I followed it with this, this and this.

Before I started tweeting about a bomb threat on UGA’s campus, I did one update announcing that all tweets between 1 p.m. and 5 would be related to the exercise, but @shanbow, @breaksthenews and @kev097 pointed out that for those who didn’t see the initial tweet, mine could have caused alarm. For this, I completely agree, and wish I had added “fake” with each post as one of them suggested. In a real-life breaking news situation, I could see tweeting as effective, but it kind of distracted me from the photographing, audio taking and just general paying attention. I stopped twittering at the point our reporters started getting more detailed information, and I think that anymore tweeting wouldn’t have been effective. In the first few minutes of breaking news, before an organization has a chance to figure out what the story is, 140-character tweets would be an effective way to build the story, if the Web site had a feed to display the tweets.

We’re still working on our site, and I’ll update tonight after all the groups share their work and we critique one another. I’m going to quit blogging and be more of a team player. As we go, check out what we’re working on:
MSCNE gold
MSCNE blue
MSCNE green