Gawker: valleywag, rocky mountain news

Rocky Mountain News ends deadly boring funeral Twitters

Jackson West — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:20:00 EDT

Denver's Rocky Mountain News is having more trouble with the newspaper's grand experiment in using Twitter as a reporting tool. Reporting tool? Twitter is for oversharing and posting links to ninja cat videos on YouTube. Even before the fishwrap was sending reporters to tweet updates from a child's funeral, it had set up a Twitter feed to let reporters send updates from the action at the Democratic National Convention. One hack from Scripps Howard sent an update that included the word "fucker," and to scrape the term from the site editors had other reporters flood the site with tweets to push the obscenity off the page. At least we won't have to worry about a reporter cussing mid-funeral.

It wasn't public outcry that convinced the editors to stop asking reporters to post morbid 140-character updates. Instead it was a staffer with a sense of discretion and a little humanity who raised concerns that experimenting with new medium during a memorial service for the victim of a tragic accident isn't in the best of taste.

(Photo by Evan Sims

Editor doesn't apologize for reporter Twittering at toddler's funeral

Jackson West — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

"Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper," Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple explains of his paper's decision to have reporter Berny Morson send public Twitter updates live from the funeral of three-year-old Marten Kudlis, who was killed when a driver crashed into an ice cream shop in Aurora, Colo. Temple stops well short of apologizing for any lapse in judgment. But the people he should apologize to are the paper's owners. Newspapers are a business, and if children bleed, the story leads to a lot of advertising inventory. When the print business model is dying, why is it giving away pageviews to Twitter instead of liveblogging on its own website?

Reporter tweets 3-year-old's funeral

Paul Boutin — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:20:00 EDT

The only people more tragic than Web 2.0 pundits who demand newspaper reporters overshare their every move are the reporters who take their advice. Berny Morson from Denver's Rocky Mountain News dragged the gravesite into the 21st century Wednesday by sending updates from the funeral of a three-year-old boy killed in a car crash that made headlines last week. I'm not saying Berny (is that M or F?) shouldn't have done it — I'm saying Berny did it wrong. Rather than convey the human drama on location, Morson dryly noted each step in a ritual that readers could have guessed. Next time, why not let the next of kin do the typing? That seems easier.