The Internet and Rapid Turnaround

So, as The Orion editorial board settled in for the Wednesday night meeting, photo editor Brian Kennedy received a phone call. I'm not sure from who, but the news on the other end of the line was interesting: a JetBlue airliner was going to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles.

So, after the meeting, BK was able to find a live video feed. A few of us huddled around a computer screen as the plane touched down, made some pretty sparks, and (thankfully) landed without much incident.

After this, BK brought up the question if the wire had anything up already. Curious, I rushed to my usual site for getting information off the wire: Yahoo! News (yeah, an odd correlation between that and my Shi Tao post from two weeks ago, but going there is habit).

Now, this is no more than three minutes after the plane touched down. Already, there on the top of the Yahoo! News page, was a story proclaiming the safe landing of the JetBlue flight.

It was one sentence long.

After this, I went over to the LA Times, where there was also a top story on the safe landing. I clicked on that as well.

There was a full story. But only minutes after the plane landed?

So I started reading the story. Everything was talking about the anticipation of the plane landing. Near the top, there was a two-sentence mention of the plane landing safely set apart from the rest of the story. Let me remind you, the story was running with a headline talking about the safe landing. If you tried searching for the story on LA Times today, good luck. You aren't going to find it.

Here, we see two very different examples of how to handle a progressively breaking news event. Through Yahoo, we see a wire (I wish I had noted which one) putting out a separate, and short info update. The LA Times used a short information, but then placed it over a story that was written before the plane landed.

Which one is better? Each has it's advantages. With Yahoo, you getting the info you want right away and that's it. The LA Times might confuse people who are scanning over it on first glance (which happened to me), but it then provides more details on the events and concerns leading up to the emergency landing.

ultimately, I would choose to go with the LA Times' approach. There is no certainty that people have been following breaking news incidents from the beginning. Background information is important for readers.