Breaking news is a staple of local TV, but it doesn’t often happen like this. Two minutes into the 10 p.m. newscast on Chicago’s WLS-TV on Dec. 23, 2007, a minivan crashed into the studio. The driver later was quoted as saying he “wanted to be on the news.” Here’s how anchor Ravi Baichwal reacted:
Kudos to Ravi for keeping it clean. But the incident does make you wonder about the wisdom of glass-fronted, street-level studios, doesn’t it?
Some news organizations have used the microblog site Twitter in the past to send updates about breaking news stories like the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the California wildfires. Now the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is “twittering” in a slightly different way about a local highway construction project. The paper has recruited a “twitter team” of commuters, only a few of whom work for the newspaper, to cover the shutdown of Highway 40 and its effect on traffic. The result is a stream of very short comments that range from useful to silly. Examples:
40 E is a parking lot from lindburgh to the city
Drove to work today, because carrying brownies on the metro is tacky. Traffic actually wasn’t terrible.
A lady just stuck her tounge (sic) out @ me after not letting me merge
You can see how getting some of this information in real time could be helpful, but if most comments are like the last two, it wouldn’t surprise me if drivers wind up being frustrated with both the traffic and the newspaper. We’d love to know how it all shakes out.
Advancing the Story 