When the first emergency calls sounded Monday — with "heavy smoke" and a "major fire under the bridge" — Times photographer Kate Glass and reporter Patrick Anderson raced to a dock beneath the A. Piatt Andrew Bridge, while photo correspondent Desi Smith parked at LobstaLand and rushed up the other side of the Route 128 span.
A day later, Kate and staff writer Richard Gaines responded first to an emergency call from Wingaersheek Beach, where two teen-aged boys were feared missing in the surf. Then, as the day wore on, Kate captured photos illustrating bathers wading into the water off Good Harbor Beach, where the city strictly limited swimming due to the dangerous riptides. She and Richard responded to Eastern Point, where a recreational fisherman lost his life when he was swept off a rock. And later, Richard and Desi headed for Magnolia where another man was swept from the rocks — and thankfully rescued — off Rafe's Chasm.
Those responses are typical of the folks who work in the news business. It may feel safe to keep tabs on what's happening from the comfort of the Times offices here on Whittemore Street. But we can provide much more up-to-date coverage with staffers at the scene — and that's what happened this week.
Stories such as this pose a number of issues when it comes to breaking and updating the coverage between the time they are first posted online at gloucestertimes.com to the final versions printed in the next day's TImes.
Indeed, from the time we first reported Monday's A. Piatt Andrew Bridge fire, we posted six updates to the Breaking News story at gloucestertimes.com — noting the street closures and traffic conditions. There were also six updates plus the final print story covering Tuesday's frightening and, in one case, deadly riptides off our shores.
Those updates don't simply mean adding more and more information; it means updating and making other revisions as well. For example, the first Tuesday online story focused solely on the search for the two teens of Wingaersheek Beach, which involved police, fire and rescue personnel, all-terrain vehicles and other apparatus. But as the day wore on, that search — while successful — seemed less significant compared with the city banning beach swimming and the life-and-death rescue efforts that followed. So many details in the early Breaking News stories never showed up in the next day's Times at all.
In that vein, you may well wonder, why would your community's newspaper do that?
For one thing, the story that appears in the next morning's Times is designed to be the final, conclusive story that pulls together the many updated Breaking News stories. But "conclusive" doesn't mean "all-inclusive." If we had included every tidbit from all the Breaking News stories, the final, print story each day could have run close to 2,000 words. That would have been difficult to read — and would have included information that, by the morning, would have seemed obsolete.
In Monday's coverage, for example, we used text alerts and Breaking News stories to keep motorists snared in the bridge fire traffic nightmare up to date on conditions along Route 128, and especially Gloucester's Essex Avenue through Kent Circle, the obvious detour route.
But by the next morning — aside from noting the obstacles drivers had faced — rehashing every one of those details would have only clogged up the story, and didn't have the same urgency they did at the time. Also, the print story on the bridge fire focused the cause of the blaze — which, of course, we didn't even know when the news first broke, and couldn't confirm through firefighters until a few hours later.
This on-the-scene, Breaking News reporting for gloucestertimes.com and our presentation of a thorough story and multiple photos in the Times reiterates that our online coverage isn't a substitute for the the Gloucester Daily Times. It's meant to complement it — and that was our goal in presenting the same-day and followup coverage our news team delivered this week, and when Earl moved north toward our off-shore waters Friday night.
As always, let me know what you think.
Questions? Comments? Is there a topic you'd like to see addressed in a future column? Contact Times Editor Ray Lamont at 978-283-7000, ext. 3438, or rlamont@gloucestertimes.com.
