Immediacy.
That’s the one competitive advantage our broadcast journalist colleagues have held over newspapers when it came to covering breaking news.
Newspapers always have taken pride in producing more in-depth and insightful coverage of breaking news than that provided by radio and television.
But we always had to wait for a printing press to be fired up and the newspapers to be delivered in order to disseminate the news.
That’s not the case anymore.
Once again this week, our newsroom saw the power and the potential that the Internet offers for newspapers — the same Internet that some mistakenly predict will make the printed newspaper extinct.
The 7 a.m. execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh near Terre Haute on Monday occurred at about the worst time possible in terms of a morning newspaper’s cycle.
The “news” of McVeigh’s death would be nearly 24 hours old by the time readers read it in Tuesday’s editions.
But by using our Web site, IndyStar.com, The Star reported McVeigh’s death just minutes after he was pronounced dead at 7:14 a.m.
More so than in any previous big story, the online components were integrated tightly into our coverage plans for the execution — primarily because of the lag time until our Tuesday morning paper.
Monday’s front page had prominent promos of our online coverage for that morning.
Reporter Scott MacGregor was assigned to write stories exclusively for online. He did his own reporting, along with gathering information from the six other reporters in Terre Haute from The Star and our sister paper, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.
MacGregor’s first online story, posted at 4:30 a.m., told about the selection of media witnesses, including The Star’s Diana Penner. By noon he had written four online stories that were updated numerous times.
In addition to MacGregor’s efforts, IndyStar.com had a photo gallery of a dozen pictures from Terre Haute taken by Star photographers.
Suzanne McBride, the assistant city editor who coordinated The Star’s efforts in Terre Haute, said integrating the online components into the overall coverage plan helped improve the report in Tuesday’s print edition.
“Our online coverage helped the folks writing for the paper make their stories more focused and looking forward,” she said. “We always try to do that with second-day stories, but this forced us to focus even more intensely.”
McBride sees some lessons here for the future.
“It’s a continuum. It just happens that some stories appear first online and others appear first in print,” she said. “More and more, we need to think in those terms in the newsroom.”
Readers are learning to look to their local newspaper Web site for instant reporting. IndyStar.com had more than 400,000 page views on Monday, up 20 percent from the previous week.
The most-read story online Monday — with even more page views than the main story — was Penner’s firsthand account of the execution, according to Tim O’Keeffe, assistant content manager for IndyStar.com.
“Diana’s story was clearly something distinctive, and something readers could not get anywhere else,” O’Keeffe said.
