Reactions from Boston
April 17, 2013 Leave a comment
via telegraph.co.uk
I had a story in yesterday’s paper that may be one of the best I’ve ever written and also one of the toughest.
Tracking down people who ran in a marathon that was attacked isn’t something I thought I would ever have to do.
I was able to get in touch with four people who were at the race, some close, some far. I lucked out, really. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I talked to one timer, two runners and one spectator that meshed into a great story. It wasn’t easy, but it all worked out.
We used it as a sidebar to the national story we ran about the incident. I thought our front page was pretty damn good. We had some great photos and the headlines were excellent.
I only knew of two people who were at the race before I went into work yesterday, so I had to do some digging.
I used the marathon’s search feature to find other runners that could have been from our area and I was able to track down two runners who actually finished the race before the explosions. Everyone I talked to, including their loved ones were safe and mostly okay on Tuesday.
Mike gave me a lot of space with the story and I used all of it. That was all he made me write and I was thankful. This may sound a bit weird, but it took a lot out of me to write that story. I had been following it all day Monday and the entire thing just took the air out of me.
After Newtown, I never thought we’d have to go through something like that again. I was wrong.
I’m really happy with the way it came out and I’m proud of our paper for how we handled the entire thing.
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Journalists: How to avoid being jerks when reporting on national news stories on Twitter – slate.me/11kndgi
— Matthew Keys (@TheMatthewKeys) April 16, 2013
I found this post on Monday by Jeremy Stahl, and I needed to talk about it. It’s a great one-stop shop for journalists and people alike on how to tweet and generally react to high pressure situations.
It’s very insightful and uses real tweets from Monday as a guide of what to and not to do. It opened my eyes and actually propelled me to make some changed of my own for the next time a disaster happens.
It’s one thing to retweet everything you see, but it’s another to find the best information out there and make sure your followers see it. I need to do a better job of that and focus more on the “official” information and not getting sidetracked by others on Twitter.
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As of Tuesday afternoon, I’m doing okay. This post has taken me awhile to write, but that’s okay. It’s important for me to keep up with what’s going on around me and get in this blog as quickly as I can. I think I needed to write about it because I wanted to try to understand how everything happened and put the pieces together.
As a country, we still have too many questions than answers, but slowly everything will come to light and we’ll all be waiting patiently.
Thank your for reading.
Jonathan
Just Starting Out 