iSalon: Reporter debrief from Boise visit
Reporter Meghann M. Cuniff is back from Boise, after taking the grim Joseph Edward Duncan III case to Twitter. (more archive coverage here) Two questions today - Where would S-R use a microblogging format again, and how do you make money from it? For one, folks recommend developing a similar technology in-house, to keep the viewer traffic in a Spokesman-Review venue instead of diverting it to a third-party site. The plan is to use similar microblogging format for other cases in the pipeline.
» Access details: Cuniff shipped out to Boise and sat in a separate media room with the audio piped in. Updated for clarity. Journalists had the freedom to walk over to a window to the courtroom they needed to see something, e.g. when prosecution brought in the video of Duncan with the children. One of Cuniff's original concerns was that it would be difficult to figure out who was speaking when, with only the audio piped in. But because there were so few people talking during the proceedings, it was easy to keep them straight.
» The feed was valuable: Many readers were eager to read the feed, and some staffers described themselves as being glued to their screens for updates. Cuniff approached the case as a play-by-play and blogged as much as she could. Because Twitter allows no edits, Cuniff made corrections by deleting a post and quickly reposting a corrected version. There was some reader pushback on Huckleberries, readers saying that this is too much information and that they are finished with reading up on this case, to which the general newsroom response is that people can choose not to read it - different from having a Twitter feed dropped on your front porch in the morning.
» It hurts everybody. What happened in summer of 2005 to the Groene family became much more than a news story through these proceedings, Cuniff said. The more small details were revealed, Duncan's planning process, technical details about hard drives, sequence of events... the more the case felt more tangible and it made sense exactly HOW one man was able to create that much carnage. "That happened in pretty much everyone's backyard," Cuniff said, and that no amount of justice could ever be enough.