National news outlets are wall-to-wall Wednesday afternoon with coverage of a small aircraft crash into a high-rise building on Manhattan's Upper East Side (near Rockefeller Center). As of 2:15 p.m., three Omaha TV media outlets' websites (KETV, WOWT, KPTM) carried preliminary details of the incident, which occurred before 2 p.m. CT. KMTV - which markets itself as a "Breaking News" station - had no mention of the crash on its website, www.action3news.com.
However, KMTV (Cox Channel 5) later ran a continuous crawl over-the-air providing details of the incident.
8 comments:
Looks like you helped them remember that they are "Action 3"...they finally got the story up around 5pm (more than 3 hours later) as BREAKING NEWS! Thanks for playing action 3.
I think they are a TELEVISION station first, and they were the first and only TELEVISION STATION with a crawl on the AIR.
Do you want people to watch your station or your website?
That's a good point. Television stations can fight all they want for internet traffic... That's has more to do with potential revenue. The last time I looked the internet is still not my TV (However I'm sure it will be someday) Come on Sean... Give credit... If Action-3 at a Crawl on before everyone else... Say it. If you are only going to critique websites then say so. The two are different.
I rarely look at station websites unless I am searching for something specific. On the other hand, I do watch a lot of TV. Shouldn't a TV stations priority be TV? In my opinion, Action 3 wins.
Seeing the crawl was good in that it made me turn to CNN, Fox and MSNBC for full complete coverage, so there was no need to wait until 5 or 6 to get the details.
Channel 3's crawl didn't run until more than an hour after the crash, well after all other websites in the area were running with it. Also, from a recent study by the Knight Foundation for the Poynter Institute:
• Sixty-six percent of high school students get their news and information from the news pages of Internet portals such as Google and Yahoo!, 45 percent from national TV news Web sites, 34 percent from local TV or newspaper Web sites, 32 percent from blogs and 21 percent from national newspaper sites.
• Forty-five percent of high school students say TV provides the most accurate news, 23 percent say newspapers and 10 percent say blogs.
More and more people, especially during working hours, want to access news on their timeline, i.e. the Internet, no matter if it is local, national or worldwide. Channel 3 is simply showing the same short sightedness that keeps them at a distant third in the local news race, no matter how much psuedo "Breaking News" they "cover".
It was a small plane crash thousands of miles away with a baseball player whose name was only known to die hard baseball fans. In fact, it wasn't confirmed until after 5:00pm that it was really him. I don't count it as "Breaking News" for this area. Tragic, definitely, but not something that warranted a continuous crawl or a long break-in segment.
Yes, even after 9/11, most news organizations probably disregard planes hitting buildings in New York City as not worth their attention. Also, hindsight is always 20/20.
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