UPDATED: Attacker at Ohio State University killed

Ding, ding, doggie.

 

Posted like a lame long-time poster hiding under a new handle. Most of this board moved past the Pavlov crap a long time ago. Perhaps you missed it in your absence.

 

Visit a slaughterhouse and you probably won't eat steak or hamburgers for a while. Read that ProPublica article about the conditions employees in a turkey processing plant endure and you might have paused before Thanksgiving dinner.

The immediate news cycle allows us to watch the proverbial sausage getting made. It's not pretty. YF knows this, but he revels in it because it gives him a chance to taunt a board filled with members of the media about how much their profession sucks.

 

Who here has covered an active shooter situation/violent assailant in a crowded place? Not showing up nine hours later but getting there just as the yellow tape has gone up?

I've done three of these in the last ten years.

It's far different than waiting for Belichick to mumble on the Wednesday conference call to the opposing team's writers.

First thing you do is gather interviews and sound with ANYBODY who will talk. Not the cops or the homicide detectives because they'll be there for 7 hours. You get whomever was in the lecture hall, the mall, the office building. Those sources could leave at any moment.

Then you tell the police or investigators to keep you in the loop when they will talk. If you have a good rep, they'll give you a heads up after 15 minutes before they talk.

Often if you have a good police source, you can glean the information in code on fatalities, suspects, whether anyone is in custody.

Outside of the number of attackers, the weapons they used, fatalities and whether anyone is in custody, any other info is just scenery in the first hours.

I've had to sit on news of fatalities that were off the record because the possibility of having to take a report back later - rare as it could be - doesn't make it worth it. There's no upside.

Police won't work with you on future incidents if you break something before they make it official. Twitter will savage you if you send out one tweet with a misspelling, even if you're in the dark, tweeting in freezing rain trying to get information out.

People like YF demand updates every 3 damn minutes of an active shooter situation. Then they complain that there's nothing new even when the cops won't talk for five more hours.

Just read about it tomorrow morning in the Dispatch when it hits your door. That way you'll see all of the facts 18 hours later.

 

#PrayForJournalism

 

As a businessperson, let me ask this: How much money is made by getting something out on social media before everyone else? How much money is lost if everyone else gets something out on social media before you?

My guess is that the answer to both of these questions is "very, very little." Which leads me to wonder why someone in the media would take such huge professional risks. No upside, tremendous downside. Is the professional payoff that high? I mean, when you're making the push for your next gig, do you have a "Twitter Scoops" section on your resume?

 

I responded to probably a dozen active-shooter calls in my former career. Each time, no matter how cut and dried it seemed, it took a bare minimum of two hours to get the basic details confirmed and on the record. We're talking, like, three tweets' worth of information, if that.

One time, I got to the scene a minute or two before the police did. I stood in an empty parking lot about 30 feet from the still-armed killer - and watched him get taken down and into custody.

And I still didn't have more than 4-5 inches of usable copy by deadline.

 

Profits first? Nice optimism, YF squared.

 

Does your desire to see professionals tweet accurately and well extend to the President-Elect?

 

Again, don't blame the TV reporters entirely. They're being told to feed the machine.

 

Oh, not blaming in the least. Simply trying to understand the game as it's played.