Does it feel as if we’ve had more than our share of disasters in the last five years? Make a list: earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes galore. Tractor trailers flipped into the air like Styrofoam.

Don’t forget the man-made varieties: oil spill in the Gulf, nuclear meltdown in Japan, even a cruise ship on its side off the coast of Italy.

Oh, there’s an asteroid heading this way.

Whatever disaster looms, the journalists who cover it will be walking in footsteps of a giant.

A strong case could be made that the inventor of full-speed-ahead, story-of-the decade coverage was a cigar-smoking, hand-wringing legend named Carr Vattel Van Anda, known in the New York Times newsroom as V.A. or Boss.

The date was Sunday, April 14, 1912 — almost 100 years ago to the day — and V.A. was working his usual shift, past midnight and into the early morning hours. A sleepy news cycle turned electric when an alarm was sounded out of the copy room. The A.P. bulletin read: “At 10:25 o’clock tonight the White Star Line steamship Titanic called ‘CQD’ to the Marconi station here, and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate assistance was required.”

Evaluating the early evidence, Van Anda smelled a disaster and geared up his troops for coverage. While editors at other papers prepared cautious announcements reminding readers of the ship’s unsinkable reputation, Van Anda prepared for the worst. A first-edition package of stories was prepared, contained images of the ship and its captain, a list of notable people on board, stories of recent near-misses of ships with icebergs, a history of ships that had been lost as a result of such encounters. The news staff cranked out as many “short takes” as possible with details of the disaster, copy boys running around the newsroom snatching them out of typewriters.

The following headline ran across the front page:

NEW LINER TITANIC HITS AN ICEBERG;

SINKING BY THE BOW AT MIDNIGHT;

WOMEN PUT OFF IN LIFEBOATS;

LAST WIRELESS AT 12:27 A.M. BLURRED

The achievement of that first day would be impressive enough, but Berger’s history highlights what happened next. Berger calls it “the ultimate in disaster news coverage.”

Under Van Anda’s direction, city editor Arthur Greaves mobilized every available reporter. The Carpathia was due into port carrying more than 700 survivors of the disaster. Only four reporters from each paper would be allowed on board, and then only after all the survivors had disembarked.

“Van Anda was in quite a frenzy. The whole story would have to be gathered, assembled and in type within the three hours between the Carpathia arrival at 9:30 p.m. and first-edition time at 12:30 a.m., and he was ready to devote almost the entire Friday Times to it.”

Here were the elements of Van Anda’s plan:

• Pay for a whole floor in a hotel near where the ship would come into port.
• Install four telephones at the hotel connected to Times rewrite desk.
• Send 16 reporters to the pier with only four passes.  Reporters without passes would work the docks, getting as close to survivors as possible.
• Assign the main stories to the four reporters with passes.
• Instruct reporters to rush to the hotel for debriefing by rewrite men, and re-assignment.

¿Why do journalists fail in doing their jobs properly? Nick Davies summarises his book Flat Earth News 

¿Why do journalists fail in doing their jobs properly? Nick Davies summarises his book Flat Earth News 

Billy Wilder’s Front Page: “Who reads the second paragraph?” Has journalism changed THAT much?

Vintage Journalism: Writing and Editing Jobs for Newspapers and Magazines (1940) (by thefilmarchive)

The news article is obsolete in the digital era. 

thedeadline:

I’m going to write this in a stream of consciousness, the same way I experienced Joplin.

It was my first time covering — more accurately, trying to cover — a disaster. The National desk knows I am a weather geek, so I came close to covering the tornadoes in North Carolina in April, and then the tornadoes in Alabama earlier this month. But the timing wasn’t right in either case.

This time, it was. I happened to be awake at 2 a.m. for a 6 a.m. ET flight to Chicago on Monday morning, just 12 hours after the tornado struck in Joplin. While in the air, I wondered if I should volunteer to go there. When I landed, I looked at the departure board and saw that a flight was leaving for Kansas City in 45 minutes. On a whim, I walk-ran to the gate and asked if I could buy a standby ticket. The agent said yes.

Two calls to New York later, I booked the 8 a.m. CT flight. I told the National desk that I’d be in Joplin at noon local time. I had no maps, no instructions, no boots. I had a notebook but no pen.

What I learned: always carry extra pens.

My cell phone was dying, but I reserved a car online before take-off. On the flight, I wrote a blog post about Oprah.

I was in the rental car at 9:45 and on the highway three minutes later. 176 miles to go, fueled by granola bars purchased at Whole Foods the day before. On the way, there was a conference call with the National desk. I was to travel to the ruined hospital and try to interview doctors, patients and other survivors. My worry, of course, was that the survivors would be far away from the hospital.

Monica Davey, a Times correspondent in Chicago, texted me the hospital address. My iPhone, now charging through my laptop, showed the way ahead. But as I approached Joplin, cell service began to degrade dramatically.

I’m aware that what I’m going to say next will probably sound petty, given the scope of the tragedy I was witnessing. But the lack of cell service was an all-consuming problem. Rescue workers and survivors struggled with it just as I did.

What I learned: It’s easy to scoff at the suggestion that satisfactory cell service is a matter of national security and necessity. But I won’t scoff anymore. If I were planning a newsroom’s response to emergencies, I would buy those backpacks that have six or eight wireless cards in them, all connected to different cell tower operators, thereby upping the chances of finding a signal at any given time.

This is my first time coming upon a natural disaster as a reporter. I suppose my instinct should be “first, do no harm.”

Entering Joplin, I drove along 32nd Street, the south side of the devastated neighborhood, getting my bearings, wondering if it was safe to drive over power lines, looking for a place to leave my car. I parked a block from the south side of the hospital and approached on foot, taking as many pictures as possible, knowing I’d need them later to remember what I was seeing.

I tried to talk to a couple of nurses. They said they were not allowed to.

I started trying to upload pictures to Instagram. It sometimes took what seemed like ten minutes of refreshing to upload just one picture.

A view of the north side of the hospital in Joplin. http://instagr.am/p/EoTHO/

What I learned: In areas with spotty service, Instagram and Twitter apps need to be able to auto-upload until the picture or tweets gets out. (I’m sure there’s a technical term for this.)

I walked to 26th Street, north of the hospital, where the satellite trucks had piled up, and found The Weather Channel crew that had arrived in Joplin just after the storm. After interviewing the crew, we watched the search of a flattened house. That’s when I was able to see the extent of the damage to the neighborhood for the first time.

I’m speechless.

Part of me thought, “This is a television story more than a print story.” It was an appeal to the heart more than the brain.

I started trying to tweet everything I saw — the search of the rubble pile, the sounds coming from the hospital, the dazed look on peoples’ faces.

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(vía copyeditor)