Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Journalists and bloggers take on a fire story "It was raining fire," said Fire Capt. Darrell Whitaker (quoted by the Associated Press) Living about a mile from the downtown warehouse fire, I couldn't smell the smoke from inside the house, but it hit me when I opened the door to head for school... That was eight hours after the fire started. By the time I got to the classroom computer, the News Sentinel's http://KnoxNews.com had five stories, three slide shows, links to a half dozen videos and as many bloggers' reports. Photographer Saul Young, the paper's first person on the scene, narrated a slide show of staff photos.  CNN's website had just posted the story, via Associated Press. By afternoon, people were online writing about the fire from West Virginia to New York to the other side of the Atlantic. By evening, a search of http://news.google.com for the words knoxville, warehouse and fire found 153 sites across the U.S. carrying the story coast-to-coast and north to Alaska. Local community blog KnoxViews had its first report at 1:35 a.m. Five hours later, Randy Neal, the website's proprietor, signed in and offered an photo of the rear of the warehouse taken a couple of years ago -- showing dozens of broken windows and a generally run-down look. RestoreKnoxville.com marked up an older aerial photo to show what buildings were burning. LiveJournal blogger weyrwolfen's item about the fire prompted a note of commiseration from a friend in the UK, who took time to think about Knoxville while writing by candlelight (and battteries), cooking dinner (gas) and waiting for an electrician. Online, WBIR linked to live pictures of the scene from its skycam and added an archived story from last year about the "blighted" building, and collected more than 170 comments from viewers... including one linking to WVLT VolunteerTV.com for on-the-scene video. WATE's website story ran close to 1,000 words, with a sidebar about back taxes due on the building. (WVLT and WATE videos, alas, are not friendly with Macintoshes. I wish they'd use Quicktime.) At UT, our new Tennessee Journalist student news site had a short story and excellent photos by Annie Hirst and Anne-Claire Siegert, demonstrating that it should put its photographer photo credits in darker type. Meanwhile, "girljournalist" Staci Martin-Wolfe, who played a big part in getting tnjn.com running (before running away to New York), was awakened at 6 a.m. by a call from Jay Baird in Knoxville, telling her about the fire and pass on a link to flickr's collection of his pictures of the fire. He shot them from the 8th floor of a luckier former warehouse around the corner -- the Sterchi condo building. (Baird is a software engineer for E.W. Scripps, the parent company of the News Sentinel, so KnoxNews also linked to his photos.) Final note, a nice comment -- Jay's photo album prompted the message I mentioned coming from West Virginia -- another flickr user writing to compliment the pictures, but also add this: "Very good Fire Department to prevent the other buildings going up as well." 8:14:18 PM    comment []

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