Monday, July 6, 2009

Daily News Responds

All in all, I feel the Daily News did an admirable job keeping up with the tanker truck crash on 95, at least within the confines of conventional journalism.

The updates were comprehensive and mostly helpful, but I couldn't help but feel the staff is being shackled by the limits of their technology.

In a better scenario, the Web site should have been awash in images from this compelling story. Later in the day, the paper did post an slide show of Bryan Eaton photos which I found interesting and well done but the images were too small, taking up less than one-eighth of the page, with the rest of the space spent on ads and white space.

I know it's a commercial enterprise, so the ads are necessary. But the pictures suffered.

The Daily News did secure a video of the scene, but I have to agree with the commentors. It didn't add anything to the story.

The News did put a call out to readers to email their personal stories related to the accident and crippling traffic. I'm interested in seeing if they query produces any responses.

I thought the Newburyport Today blog provided an noteworthy contrast in presentation. It merely posted some photos with links to other sources (and NOT to the Daily News, an omission that I found interesting) including Twitter.

With the superior content, I think the Daily News would have benefited from having access to a simple blogging tool that could easily post short reports and photos.

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