It’s a fair bet that many people who read the newspaper do not have Twitter accounts. You’d also probably be safe in the assumption that a good number of them don’t get a lot of what a media company not owned or run by a Murdoch would consider news from their Facebook pages, either.
But the number of people who do is increasing. So it’d probably be another good bet to write your stories for both sorts of people.
If I’ve been on Twitter, tweetling around, and following a story like Norway as it unfolds, by the time I read the morning paper, or even the composed stories on the paper’s website, I’m going to want more. If there aren’t any more facts, I’m going to want some analysis, some context, some background.
I got a little of that from Doug Saunders’ Globe piece the next day, leading with a reminder of the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize is headquartered in Oslo, and pointing out that the murder rate in the country has been about 40 annually since the second world war.
This is something we need from papers these days. The story had all the information we needed, put in an order our other forms of media are unlikely to be able to emulate any time soon.
The Star’s work wasn’t as good. Seemingly caught off guard, though they were able to put the story on their front page just like everyone else, they threw to page A23 with their lead story on Norway (Saunders’ was on A4, preceded by a wire story on A3), which was followed by two others, one on the fact that the guy was Norwegian, another on the unfolding horror on Utoya (which was oddly headed by a large five-column picture from the blast site in Oslo).
The Post actually has a pretty early press deadline, so the extra breadth is probably due to the paper’s greater than average willingness to use material gleaned not only from wire services but other newspapers, meaning the Post was able to have stories on A2, A3 and A4. They were also the only ones who got any info from the alleged shooter’s Facebook (though they got it quoting ABC News quoting the Norwegian media).
But with the exception of Saunders’ sagacity, I’m afraid I didn’t get anything, other than a couple of maps showing me how close Utoya is to Oslo (the Star’s was the best), that I either hadn’t already got from Twitter and various Facebook links by the time the papers thumped outside my door Saturday morning.
Actually, there was one thing.
Despite every story making it clear high up that the prime and only suspect was Norwegian, both nationally and ethnically, and several eyewitnesses accounts of a blond man speaking Norwegian being the shooter on Utoya, the Post devoted six paragraphs and the Star a whopping nine over the course of their stories to Islam, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, etc. The Globe comes out on top here, with just one, and that was in their AP wire story; their own man didn’t even mention it. He did point out on Twitter that 0.33 per cent of European terrorism has been committed by Muslims. But he quite rightly did not mention even a word about something that had nothing to do with anything but people’s prejudicial fears. The Post even went so far, in a paragraph I’m not counting because it didn’t actually mention Islam or Muslim people, as to say that the gunman didn’t raise any suspicions because he was blond and spoke fluent Norwegian.
The papers devoting as much space as they did to it—seven of the Star’s nine paragraphs were in Olivia Ward’s story—is the rough equivalent of a story about the capture of Paul Bernardo going on at length about the fact that he might have been black, that some people thought he was probably black, but look, he’s not black (though maybe he was put up to it by black people, because most murders were hear about are, you know, by them).
We need more than this, and the newspapers need more than this if they’re going to continue to profit off that first syllable of theirs (you know, the news). Both the Star and the Post came across as if they were scrambling. The Globe didn’t, but even that was mostly because of Saunders’ tone, part of which comes from being a good writer, but part of it from the fact that he’s the paper’s European bureau. Though he’s based in London, he’s been steeping himself in all the European cultures and goings on for years now, and it’s probably one of the reasons he was able to throw in that murder rate so quickly.
Bureaux are expensive, we all know that. I have no idea how much it costs the Globe to keep Saunders and his family in London, and to fly him to Benghazi on a Monday, Cairo on Wednesday, back to London on a Thursday and Oslo on Saturday, as they did last week, but it’s a lot. It paid off for them this week, as it has with Stephanie Nolen, first in Africa, now in India.
But even if papers don’t have bureaux, they can still have experts. Even with the cutbacks and the layoffs and the buyouts, there are still enough people at each paper to have regional specialties, part of whose job description, in addition to being the crime guy or the woman at city hall, is to keep up on East Africa, or Micronesia, or Scandinavia. It’s easier now than it’s ever been; you don’t even need the papers’ special access to wire services and whatnot. Just subscribe to the right newspaper newsletters and glance through them every morning (or afternoon, or evening, depending on the time zone), build up a directory of some names and facts and recent history, so that when something happens somewhere, there’s a go-to guy to add value to a story, to add expertise.
For heaven’s sake, this is Toronto: we’ve got people from everywhere here. And now that we’ve even started hiring some of them as reporters (and copy editors, and lay-out people, etc.…), maybe we should start taking advantage of them, their interests, their language skills, and that hour they’re going to spend reading stuff online every morning anyway.
Is there a reason this isn’t feasible? It’s more work, sure, but not a lot. And it could have helped all these stories.
