My friend and former colleague Bill Dunphy has a thoughtful analysis of the coverage that the four Toronto papers provided of those blasts in Toronto. He compares it to the work of citizen journalists, who posted comments and pictures on some blogs. [The photo on this page, in fact, is from one of those citizen journalists, Rannie Turingan, a talented blogging pioneer in Toronto who runs www.photojunkie.ca] Bill has some favourable things to say about National Post's response to the blasts although he says the mainstream media have some lessons to learn in the wake of the coverage.
Here's the top lines from Bill's posts on the subject:
About two hours before this morning's grey dawn, a series of explosions tore through a propane depot in the northwest corner of the city, shaking buildings and homes, shattering windows and waking people as far as 10 kms distant from the scene. Fire and smoke shot to heights equal to a 20 or 30 storey building and led many to think (worry? fear?) that a jet airliner had crashed, a terrorist attack had taken place, the city was being bombed.
This was breaking news with a capital 'B' and at this point, six hours distant from that 3:30 am blast, it offers some intriguing lessons in how coverage of these events is evolving in a world where digital cameras and web access are almost ubiquitous.
Bottom line – in aggregate, citizens journalists out-performed their professional counterparts getting news out faster, offering more details, and better images and videos. They also made more mistakes and had a high noise to signal ratio. Mainstream media were slow off the mark and while they depended on the citizen journalists, they failed to make the most of the possibilities that material offered. See the bottom of the post for my thoughts on how to do that. [Read the full post]