Grassroots Journalism from the Trenches

Submitted by kpaul.mallasch on Fri, 07/06/2007 - 7:38pm.

Got one call. Two Lifeline choppers on the way to scene of an accident on SR 13. Then a second call from another source. I threw on a pair of pants and walked down to the newsroom with the D80 Nikon loaned me for 12 months. Al was ready and we headed out to get the story. We weren't able to bring the police scanner, though. In any case, we approached and he let me out as near as we could get then went to park the van.

Meanwhile, I walked closer to the accident. Very bad scene. I talked to a few people and began to piece the details together. At one point, a columnist for the Anderson Herald Bulletin (can't remember her name, sorry!) approached us. She'd been called out by her Editor to act as a stringer. She had a non-dslr and a pad of paper like we did. We gave her the info we had and offered the photos we were taking in exchange for a mention of the website. (They haven't contacted me yet, for the record...)

We stuck around until the helicopter took off toward Indianapolis. On the way back to the car, we talked to the Elwood Chief of Police, Jack Miller. (We're getting along a lot better now...) He gave us some more info, but told us the Sheriff's Department was handling it.

We walked back to the car (Al parked a respectful distance away! ;) and made it back to the newsroom. I went upstairs and processed the photos, removing dupes and bad shots, tagged them all with 'kpaul media for elwoodindiana.org' and resized them. They were then burned to a DVD and brought downstairs to the newsroom, where we updated his drupal image module then uploaded around 100 images to his site. We added a story, letting people know what we knew so far w/out the official report. (We tried calling, but no answer as of yet.)

After that, I hung out in the newsroom a little, still marveling at the well-oiled journalism machine we're becoming.

Other possible good news too, but I'll save it.

Traffic is almost double what it was before we went down. (Thanks, Rush. Oh, and while I'm pretending I have your attention, the bit on the bottom of your link to MFP says, "*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time." Heh. Not MFP. No wall...Anyways...)

The content also got distributed on the County Seat site (Anderson Free Press), and Hoosier Photos.

Also got a surveillance video from the police up on MFP. Some decent commenting going on there as well.

That's about it for now, I think. Just a little update.

kpaul out...