Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Does anybody care: News judgement?

It is almost 11:30 p.m., and I am wondering if there has been any progress in the trapped Utah miners story. I check my usual sites: cleveland.com, washingtonpost.com and newyorktimes.com. None of these Sites have a headline on the homepage about the miners. I know it is somewhat of an old story since the collapse occurred about eight days ago, but is it not a big deal that these miners are still trapped and might or might not be alive?

As a former Web producer and editor, I am confused as to why there is no link for this story on any of homepages. I know at cleveland.com I manually updated the homepage to include all of the important stories that users would want to read, and if I was still working there today I am sure that I would have made a link to it somewhere.

Obviously I could have googled "Utah miners" and a list of recent stories would show up, but I try to give my page views to the Web Sites I like the most.

I ended up visiting The Salt Lake Tribune and I realized nothing new has developed since this morning. I assume this is why it is not featured on any of the Web Sites I checked out previously, but I'm still shocked nonetheless.

I still feel like it is an important story and I have no connection to Utah or the miners, so I feel like other people have to feel as I do too.

Do you guys think that this is something worthy of some exposure until there is closure, or do you agree with the decisions of the producers/editors to skip over it? Does it not matter where it appears on the Web as long as it is in section A of the paper?

Perhaps my news judgement escaped me since I haven't been to work in over a month...


--Jessica Kadylak

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