I used this as an example in my newswriting class Thursday, but I didn’t realize until I had a meeting with two students today, it’s also perfect for my blog. The man who crashed his plane into an Austin, Texas IRS building Thursday received a ton of media coverage, but the best, and maybe even the simplest, was on Mashable.com.
What Mashable did that as of 3 p.m. Thursday none of the other half a dozen major media outlets I checked – including the New York Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal and CBS – was post a link to Andrew Joseph Stack III’s Web site, which contained his manifesto against the IRS. They even went one step further and used Scribd.com to create an archive of the site.
Now many news sites, including The New York Times, have added their own links to the manifesto. The Times created a downloadable PDF, while the New York Daily News has pasted the text into their site. The Smoking Gun also has screen captures, which the Times linked to in its The Lede Blog.
But I’m reasonably certain that Mashable had the idea first because the site’s alert hit my e-mail box as I was frantically refreshing CNN’s live blog of the event. The reason I call Mashable’s coverage the best, despite the Herculean efforts of other media outlets to stay on top of this, is the site best known for technical scoops and commentary on the future of news, is the site’s editors anticipated the burning question audience members would have about the incident and assured they would have uninterrupted access.
I was flabberghasted that in all the breaking news coverage I monitored Thursday, Mashable was the only one with a link and an archive of Stack’s diatribe. Covering the devastation and injuries at the crash site was important, without a doubt, but what made this story different was the man behind the attacks. Stack was an upper middle-class suburbanite. He had his own plane, for heaven’s sake. When the traditional news media had a chance to drive this message home with the man’s own words, they were either too scared about or unable to verify the Web site.
I applaud Mashable and other sites that had the guts to publish the link and manifesto and face the consequences. They relied on the self-correcting nature of the Internet to guide them through. They trusted in their audience’s ability to make their own decisions about the content. To me, it seemed the large media outlets were focusing once again on force feeding audiences only what they thought they needed. I laugh now that so many of them have retreated the day after.
Maybe I’m making a big deal over nothing. Is a link really be as significant as I’m trying to make it? Probably not. The point of this post and my blog, however, is to provide examples when the media gets it, when they understand how to use the Internet for news. All Thursday’s innovative approaches to the plane crash coverage, however, disappoint when they do not allow audiences to make connections themselves.
PhotoCredit: I created this mash-up of screens from CNN and Mashable as the news broke Thursday.
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