by Steve Earley
When it snows, user-generated content pours. News organizations love weather-related citizen submissions because they are non-controversial and easily verifiable. That love was on display this past week in my native Maryland, which received over 3½ feet of snow in five days. Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, Snowverkill. No matter what you call it, that's a lot of snow!
Wednesday afternoon I sledded around the Web sites for four major Baltimore/D.C. media outlets to see what they were publishing from users. Some of it was engaging, though most of it not terribly informational. Some of it was, well, kinda flaky.
The best uses of audience submissions were in live information streams supplemented with posts from news organizations and official sources.
The first such stream was that for the Twitter hashtag "#mdsnow," which The Baltimore Sun actively promoted. Featuring tweets like "Dear roof, don't collapse. Sincerely...Jazzmen," and "Gov. O'Malley sounds pissed," it's certainly entertaining. But it serves a journalistic function, too. Collectively, users' posts paint a picture. You can watch conditions and residents' emotions deteriorate before your very eyes!
More tangibly, the well-populated hashtag feed is sprinkled with tidbits of information users might not find elsewhere, including names of businesses that are actually open and, directly from Baltimore's new mayor — what a first week! — Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (@MayorSRB), precisely how many salt trucks and plows are treating city roads (134 at 11:07 p.m. Tuesday, in case you're wondering).
Baltimore's NBC affiliate, WBAL-TV, was getting similar results from its "Live Wire," a self-reloading mashup of user comments, the television channel's responses and official tweets focusing on road and traffic conditions. One user asked whether she had to report to jury duty. Courts were closed, a fellow user informed her. But if they weren't, people have certainly offered lesser excuses than 44 inches of snow for ducking their civic duty.
Down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — a route much easier traveled this week in a blog post transition than in real life — D.C. Fox station WTTG-TV encouraged users to stream live video of their whited-out neighborhoods using their mobile phones. Plenty obliged, most via third-party service USTREAM. As good a way as any for the snowbound to connect with the outside world, I suppose. Sure to cure cabin fever, for videographers and viewers, at least for a bit.
Some of the cameras are trained on more exciting subjects than others. This bird feeder on a southern Prince George's County farm was among the cooler ones (There were lots and lots of birds when I looked at it, if there aren't now!). Still, even driveway shots helped me get a sense of the storms' brutality. Especially when the wind picked up — made me cold just looking at it.
The Washington Post's site boasted among the larger and better-quality user-submitted photo galleries. There were shots of a barely-visible U.S. Capitol building, tired shovelers, felled poles and trees and urban art like "Think Spring" spray painted on a powder-packed hillside. Oh yeah, there were the obligatory grumpy looking kids and pets. Some SPAM did get past the editors. No, not that kind. The food* kind (*using the term loosely here). The photographer claimed that was the best thing left on supermarket shelves.
I can't end this post without mentioning the Post's well-intentioned appeal for users to post a tweet if their power is out. Even in 2010, most people, if their power's out, their Internet's out. Regardless, how many mobile phone users, upon losing power during a state of emergency, are going to use precious juice and time to let the newspaper know they don't have electricity service? Based on my scroll through the stream for the Post's suggested "#poweroutage" hashtag, not many. Nothing proportionate to the tens of thousands of interruptions PEPCO and BGE were reporting anyway.
Late update: Just stumbled upon the Post's suggested #opendc hashtag — listing what's open. Now that's useful. Maybe there's even a few cybercafes on there.
Great story Steve. I really like your feature style of writing. The past week as we have discussed news media, specifically print, I keep thinking about that scene in "Field of Dreams" when elderly woman is reading the newpaper article she wrote to Ray and Terrance Mann. When I think of print journalists, I always think of that lady and the way she writes. It's the way news should be written, in my opinion and you write just that way. Thanx.
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