US: Virginia Tech tragedy breeds blog-style, citizen journalism from mainstream media
The New York Times website’s main page offered a slowly-updated story by staff writers, but directed readers to it’s The Lede blog for frequent, quick updates. The Lede carried updated victim numbers while the main page remained at 20. Early yesterday morning, the blog covered a televised statement by the school’s president identifying the shooter as a student, then posted the first picture of the gunman before the Times main page did.
The Roanoke Times, the closest daily paper to the school, covered the story using short, blog-like entries all Monday morning. "We have found this works well," said assistant managing editor Michael Stowe. "It won't stop as long as there is stuff coming in. Everyone is working."
Digg also became a source of constantly updated coverage. Anthony Le, a Tech student, said "The count of the fatalities was a lot slower on CNN than on Digg."
CollegiateTimes.com, the website for Virginia Tech's student newspaper, filed up-to-the-minute, sometimes only one-sentence entries throughout the day. The site received so much traffic that its own server is down, forcing it to use its parent site, CollegeMedia.com.
Jamal Albarghouti, a Virginia Tech graduate student, provided to CNN the cellphone pictures and video from outside the hall where the shooting took place. His video has now received 900,000 views. Monday night, CNN featured Albarghouti reporting from the campus, talking to Wolf Blitzer in the Washington newsroom.
"Let's face it, right now, his material is still the best of the day in terms of capturing on video what took place there," Nancy Lane, CNN's vice president of domestic news, said last night.
Amidst shock and devastation, online news outlets and communities, especially student-central social-networking site Facebook, became support groups where people could share information, send condolences to friends and warm wishes to survivors, and above all begin attempts to come to terms with tragedy.
Said Dan Abrams, general manger of MSNBC, "It used to be the case that they'd go to the school auditorium to grieve and talk to other students about what happened. But we're now seeing that happening online with this story. It's very powerful."
Sources: Editor and Publisher through I Want Media, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun through Romenesko at Poynter Online
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my heart and prayers go out to the students and families that have lost their friends and loved ones only a monster could be so cruel and heartless to kill anyone!!!
xoxoxo
Mullah Cimoc say this part of destroying of usa for punish for war crime in iraq.
but go back long time. this because male of ameriki, and all western society, alienated or some say obsolete. this causing the frustration and go insane.
One famous ameriki satanist naming anton levay, him book call "secret life of a satanist", him discussing this same subject so long ago and predicting accurately what happen this killing and why happenign this kind of the killing.
This has been a terrible tragedy. It has profoundly touched my heart. My prayers go out to all those people who lost someone. Recently, I read an article in the New York Times on the Korean response to what happened. Apparently, some Koreans are worried that this will become racial. The included URL is a link to my video response on this issue.
Regards,
Joshua
I feel it is important to air this information if it is coupled with thorough interviews with well known psychiatrists. Cho likely suffered with mental health disorders and unfortunately America is not educated enough, in my opinion, on such disorders as much as they are regarding physical disorders. Mental health awareness is key to preventing these massacres in the future. As a professional therapist, I want to express how very important it is for a killer to not be described as just a cold hearted murderer. This young man had mental health issues that apparently went either undiagnosed or untreated. This is not to excuse his behaviors, but at least people can better understand that biochemical imbalances likely existed. The warning signs were there, but without more education regarding mental health, these devastating events will likely continue.
There is now available breakthrough technology to build a security net (similar to a wireless data network) on a campus to make a College/University campus drug free, explosives free and gun free. This new technology would have prevented this tragic event. IPGlobal Group is currently licensing this tremendous technology.
The recents events have fallen nothing short of a tragedy. For all of those who have been personally affected by the shootings at Virginia Tech, you all are in my prays and the prayers of million.