More earthquake fallout (so to speak)
Fagstein critiques media responses to the earthquake although I think he’s kind of overdoing it here. It was a small quake, no damage done, and dozens of local media folks didn’t have to be woken up to talk about it at 1 a.m.
What most people wanted to do was check and make sure it wasn’t just them and that others had also experienced it. Twitter told me that in a few seconds. The further links to official earthquake sites were interesting but not nearly as critical. Honestly, I think people could wait till this morning to get the other background details from the mainstream media.
Tantastic Ted 13:02 on 2012/10/10 Permalink
The place shook for a few seconds, who cares? A non story.
ant6n 15:37 on 2012/10/10 Permalink
I think he’s trying to make a point that the 24-hour news rooms can’t deal with news that happen at inconvenient times during the 24-hour period.
Kate 15:55 on 2012/10/10 Permalink
Yes, I can see that, but there’s also the angle that an editor might assess the situation and decide it isn’t worth waking up a crew to handle the story.
Ted, if you can’t see why an earthquake is news, I don’t think I can help you. Maybe you should start a blog and talk about what you find interesting.
Tantastic Ted 16:24 on 2012/10/10 Permalink
Kate, I’m not attacking you, I’m criticizing the idea that some guy is surprised that news websites didn’t fire up in the middle of the night to report what was essentially an inconsequential weather story. (BTW If I’m running the Canadian Press, I’d offer a paid service posting news articles directly onto those sites, there’d be one less step in the process for those media outlets and they all could have gotten the story fast.)
Marc 22:14 on 2012/10/10 Permalink
@ Ted: 12:19 am is the middle of the night? Look at the amount of commenters here at that hours. Seems like 3/4ths of the city was awake, even if just reading/net surfing in bed.
Walkerp 22:23 on 2012/10/10 Permalink
4.5 is not a small earthquake. And 10 seconds is long. I think there is a story there in if and why earthquakes behave differently here than in areas where we are used to hearing about earthquakes.