“The Living Story Page
Richard argues strongly for evergreen story pages. It is not the brand, not the site, but the story itself that is the lifeblood online. Publishers should not think about editions, or even ephemeral streams of articles, but rather living story pages. Story pages are the most valuable real estate. Wikipedia was beating the Washington Post’s search results on Anthrax, despite all of the Post’s great reporting. [You’ll find journalists complaining about this sort of internet result filed under “P”, for “Parasites”] The Post publishes a stream of new articles with new URLs and sends the olds ones to die in the archives becauase they’re still producing content for the daily newspaper content model. The Wikipedia page is constantly changing and remaining updated, probably to this day, with a persistent URL where people can find it. News publishers complained to Google that their topics pages were being consistently beaten by Wikipedia. These topics pages are not updated in realtime. The newspapers redesigned the topics pages and began to see success. Their long-term answer to this question, though, was to hire batches more rewrite people to maintain these topics pages. To someone familiar with the internet, this is crazytalk. Why wouldn’t the journalist and editor, who are experts in this topic, just own this page as they own the beat itself? Shouldn’t the news articles themselves flow from changes to the topic page, rather than rewriting articles to produce an index? The changes needed aren’t just in content architecture, but in human workflow and roles. It comes back to, “How do we build trust?” Trust requires getting transparent about all of the content we have available to publish. It’s expensive to produce, so share it.”
— The Head of Google News on the Future of News | MIT Center for Civic Media
Friday was a long day. Chris was at court helping me out, as was our newest intern, Rebecca Zisser. Together we published six stories.
When I got hold of an indictment late Friday afternoon, I was wiped out. When I saw the document was 22 pages long, I decided to wait until Monday morning to read through it.
Which is how I ended up spending this rainy morning curled up with a cup of coffee, my laptop, and a story that outlines how a feud between two neighborhood groups led to three murders in five months in Northeast DC.
I wrote the story, including a map, photos, and the indictment, in about two hours and, right now, there’s 17 people reading it.
Did you catch that? Two hours. Seventeen people.
If I were starting from scratch, this story could have taken me several days. Instead, because I had the Homicide Watch platform, most of the legwork was already done: I already had court records, photos, mapping elements, and the contextual basis for building a story quickly. This was crucial as court records in all three homicides have now been sealed.
As soon as I published this morning, I saw the story gain traction. Immediately, before I tweeted the story or posted it to Facebook, Google real-time analytics showed five people on the story. Once I tweeted it, that number reached 23. Now, about 20 minutes after I first started this post, 12 people are on the story. About a hundred have read the story since I published 45 minutes ago. These might seem like small numbers, but they’re real readers, and not just people I assume I’m reaching because my 12 inch story landed on their doorstep this morning.
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Homicide Watch DC has links today in both the Washington Post and City Paper. So far, the click throughs are roughly even: 220 from the Post (linked at 8 a.m.) and 139 from City Paper (linked at 8:14 a.m.).
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I wrote late last week about setting the record straight when a case is dismissed, and I’m back on that shtick again today after mistrial was declared in one of my cases. Homicide Watch DC has the only report of the mistrial… but nearly every news outlet in DC covered the initial crime, and arrest, at length.
Prince Okorie was 16 years old when he was shot, twice, in the head at 4:30 in the afternoon on a residential street in DC. When Raymond Roseboro was arrested in connection with the case, Police Chief Cathy Lanier said:
This homicide occurred on an afternoon on a residential street. Members of the community offered information and have been anxious to see this case come to a closure. Our communities have spoken - this city is not a place where you can get away with murder.
But the jury wasn’t as sure as Lanier that Roseboro killed Okorie. In fact, four of the twelve jurors could not bring themselves to vote “guilty.”
Just like with the case dismissal, there have been no press releases or statements issued about the mistrial. And, it bears mentioning, that absence of a “guilty” verdict does not mean that the case is finished. A second trial date has been set for later this year, and another jury will bear the responsibility of finding justice for Okorie and Roseboro.
But the mistrial, just like Okorie’s death and Roseboro’s arrest, is newsworthy and should be part of the public record news organizations keep when they commit to covering crime.
A second-degree murder charge against Aaron Adams was dismissed last week, but search DC’s news sites for mention of it and you’ll only find news from June about his arrest.
On Homicide Watch DC, however, that top story in Adams’ news feed (aka his “suspect page”) is that the charge has been dropped. On the right sidebar, where we note if a person is suspected, convicted, etc, it says “charges dropped.”
In a year-and-a-half of reporting for Homicide Watch DC, this was the first time I’d seen a case dismissed, but it’s a situation that Chris and I talked about a lot when designing the site.
My hope is that this page makes the case record public. That future employers, friends, girlfriend’s parents, perhaps, find this page instead of one of the older news reports.
My belief is that when a news organization publishes that someone has been arrested, particularly on serious charges such as felonies, those news organizations have the responsibility to follow up as well. That saying charges were dropped is just as important as saying charges were filed.
It’s not easy to do. Typically in DC, the police department issues a press release when someone is arrested in a murder. When a conviction is achieved or a sentence handed down, the US Attorney’s Office issues a press release. I’ve yet to see any press release issued in Adam’s case, saying that the case was dismissed; I was only aware of the change in status because of my regular practice of checking all scheduled court dates for all murder suspects listed on Homicide Watch DC.
It’s a fair amount of work, but it also creates fair and honest reporting.
With the charges against him dropped, Aaron Adams’ record should be set right.
Knight News Challenge: A toolkit for real-time investigative reporting from site analytics -
1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
Build an open platform connecting search analytics and social networks to create a new breed of real-time, investigative reporting.
2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]
This is, to our knowledge,…
I was paging through news sites this evening and saw WUSA had a story on a case I had updated today. I wanted to see how they covered it, so I clicked through. Here’s what I saw:
It all sounded very familiar. In fact, it was. Here’s the press release that was sent out three and a half hours before WUSA posted the story.
For Immediate Release
Contact: Officer A. Clay 202-727-XXX (redacted by Laura Amico)
March 12, 2012
Arrest Made in the Homicide in the 3000 Block of 30th Street, S.E.
(Washington, DC)-Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Special Victims Unit have announced an arrest has been made in the homicide of a 20-month-old male child in the 3000 block of 30th Street, SE.
On Monday, March 5, 2012, units from the Seventh District were dispatched to United MedicalCenter. Upon arrival it was discovered that a 20 month old child had been transported to theMedical Center from the 3000 block of 30th Street, SE. The child was in extremely critical condition and was immediately transported to Children’s Hospital where he was subsequently pronounced dead.
The decedent has been identified as 20-month-old Keyontae Osbia Moore of Southeast,Washington, DC.
On Wednesday, March 7, 2012, an autopsy was completed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The manner of death has been ruled a homicide and the cause of death has been ruled blunt impact trauma
On Monday, March 12, 2012, at approximately 11:15 am, members from the Special Victim’s Unit arrested 28 year-old Jonathan T. Fullard, of Southeast, DC, pursuant to an arrest warrant and charged him with First Degree Felony Murder in the homicide of Keyontae Osbia Moore.
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Posting the press release was exactly what I did on Homicide Watch DC tonight, too. So I’m not upset that WUSA posted the press release. I’m upset that WUSA posted the press release, changed a few verb tenses, and passed it off as reporting without saying the source.
Columbia Journalism Review Reviews Homicide Watch DC -
Columbia Journalism Review added Homicide Watch to their listings of online news startups today, including this profile about the DC site.