hawkins

The Power of Photos

A Million Hits

You’ve all heard the old adage: A picture is worth a thousand words.

Nowhere is that more true than with our photos of the horrendous furniture store fire that claimed the lives of nine Charleston firefighters.

In the last week, photos of the fire and the emotional aftermath posted on Charleston.net have been accessed more than 1 million times. That’s an astounding number that reflects the worldwide interest in this story.

In selecting those photos, our editors have tried hard not to step over the line between telling a heart-rending story and sensationalizing a tragedy.

We have had a few letters accusing us of being insensitive, but they have been far outweighed by readers and fire department officials thanking us for our handling of the stories and photos.

I can tell you that the response has been gratifying.

 

Server Overload

Terrible timing

If you've had trouble accessing Charleston.net today, it is because we have been operating on a backup server, with half the capacity of our main unit.

As luck would have it, we had taken our main server down to work out some bugs that had been prompting it to reboot itself.

With the enormous traffic coming to our site because of the tragic fire, our backup unit cannot keep up.

We have stripped many of the features unrelated to the fire from Charleston.net and are minutes away from converting back to the main server.

We'll know soon if it will hold up.

Worth a Click

Cheap Gas
We continue to add new features to Charleston.net, and one that I think is a goldmine is a service that offers tips on where to find the cheapest gas in greater Charleston.

Those local gas prices are found under Worth a Click as you scroll down the right hand side of the home page.

Today we let readers know that they could pump a gallon of regular for $2.79 at the Shell station at Rivers and Otranto in North Charleston, or for an even cheaper $2.76 at Big T's in Goose Creek.

For those of us still shelling out (no pun intended) $2.89 or more, that's news you can use to keep money in your pocket.

Check it out.     

Goodloe-Johnson's Party

Smell Test

I’ve had a couple of e-mails questioning our Saturday story reporting that companies that do business with the Charleston County School District were asked to pony up $7,000 for a going away party for outgoing Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. The gist of the e-mails is that we weren’t being fair to Goodloe-Johnson, as this was a practice that apparently started with the farewell party for her predecessor, Ron McWhirt.

We’re checking that out now and also trying to determine if this goes on in other school districts.

Regardless, it’s a lousy idea. SSC Service Solutions, which chipped in $6,000, has a $3.4 million six-year custodial contract with the district, which could be extended for four more years. So what do you think their options were when school officials asked them to contribute to the party? They couldn’t get their checkbook out fast enough.

School board member Arthur Ravenel Jr., put the deal in proper perspective when he said: “It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Future of Newspapers

Good question

A letter came this week from a youngster at Christ Our King-Stella Maris School, asking me:

“Do you think in five years the newspaper will be gone or do you think they will still be around? I know the internet is fast, but it would take some time for all the news to come up.”

She raises a good question, one that is being hotly debated in journalism circles, as evidenced by an article in the Stanford Daily about a symposium that featured key newspaper executives.

I agree with those panelists who said we will remain prosperous in the coming years if we don’t panic. Here is part of my response to her:

“I do think newspapers will be around in five years and for quite a few years after. 

Newspapers are like many other businesses that are facing challenges from new competitors, the Internet for one. But keep in mind that our industry has weathered other threats from new competitors, from the telegraph, to radio to television, to name a few.

There is no substitute for the ease of use and portability of newspapers, and they remain a bargain in a world where a bottle of water costs twice as much as a newspaper!

Smart newspaper companies are finding ways to use the Internet to strengthen their positions as the major provider of news for their communities. Combining our print and our Web site, we reach 81 percent of all adults in the Charleston market. That's a powerful position.”

And it's a position that we hope will also serve this young lady's generation.

Web Videos

Turtle rescue

Slowly but surely our Newsroom is moving to a 24-hour operation, as our reporters and photographers take advantage of Charleston.net to post breaking news as it happens.

But they are also learning to use the Web to supplement their work in print, increasingly through the use of videos.

A great example of that is Lucia Walinchus’ story today about the rescue of a turtle off of Cape Island.

Lucia and videographer Geoff Marshall had gone out with the Fish and Wildlife Service to do a story on their work with turtle nests when, incredibly, the crew spotted a huge male loggerhead in distress.

The turtle’s left front flipper was caught in rope from an old crab pot and the animal was in serious trouble. The team was able to haul the 300-pound turtle into their small boat and get it to the “turtle hospital” at the South Carolina Aquarium.

Lucia came back to the office and wrote the story that ran on the Local & State front today, complete with her photos of the rescue. She then turned around and produced a first-rate video report, edited by Geoff, that can be found under Loggerheads at Web Extras.

This is a great example of the new world for our reporters, who are developing multi-media skills to tell stories in ways that will add tremendous value to both our newspaper and our Web site.

You can find more of our multi-media work at Web Extras at charleston.net.

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Maritime Festival

Incredible artwork

If you don’t look at anything else in today’s Post and Courier, you need to make sure you open page 6 in the A section to see the stunning depiction of the new tall ship Spirit of South Carolina by our artist Gill Guerry.

The two full color pages, in what we call the double truck position, took many weeks for Gill to put together at the same time he was learning how to use 3-D modeling.

It follows an equally impressive piece of work by fellow artist Ken Hawkins (no he's not my son) whose Sunday double truck renderings of all the tall ships was the centerpiece of our coverage of this week’s Charleston Maritime Festival.

We knew that the festival, which has attracted some of the world’s great tall ships to our harbor, afforded us an opportunity to capture a glorious era in sailing history.

Accordingly, Gill and Ken both put in weeks of research to learn about these unique ships before they made the first effort to sit down at the computer and put their skills to work.

Their meticulous attention to detail resulted in pages so beautiful that we will likely reproduce them in poster form.

Ken also created a special Web presentation that you can view at http://www.charleston.net/flash/.

I know you'll enjoy their work.

 

Breaking news story

Deadline challenge

The front-page headline at the top of today’s paper was a grabber: “State constable missing” “Lincolnville officer’s vehicle found ablaze near I-26.”

Night police reporter Nadine Parks did a tremendous job hustling that story into the paper after hearing reports on the police scanner. Her story said “about 11:45 p.m., police reported finding a Lincolnville cruiser on fire…” I’m not sure what time she nailed that, but she was clearly pushing us past the midnight deadline for last news output.

Good teamwork by our night staff resulted in an organized scramble by reporters and editors to work the phones to confirm the story, while other editors and designers reworked several pages to move an Iraq story from A-1 to an inside page.

Making deadline is crucial to getting our papers delivered on time, so editors also arranged a swap with sports, which is usually the last section out with a 12:20 deadline. Sports closed early, giving that time to news and enabling us to start the press just eight minutes late.

It would have been easy for our Newsroom to blow off the story and just put it up on Charleston.net. That they didn’t helps to explain why The Post and Courier is growing daily circulation and readership, even in this era of instant news on the Web.

Comics Changes

Two new strips

My telephone has been eerily quiet today, not at all what I had expected.

Editors can count on catching hell when they start messing with the comics. As one reader told me in my last job, “Mr. Hawkins, the only reason I take your rag is for the obits and comics.”

Features Editor Judy Watts arrived early today, prepared to field calls from aggrieved fans of B.C. and Shoe, two long-time members of our comics pages.

We swapped them out this week in favor of Luann and F-Minus, two strips that have won national awards and boast millions of readers in other cities. 

We were emboldened to make the change following the April death of Johnny Hart, creator of B.C. Shoe’s creator died in 2000, and the strip suffered from being drawn by a trio of cartoonists.

This marks the first change in our comics lineup since we tried to drop Andy Capp a year or so ago. We were compelled to restore him after a non-stop barrage from outraged Cappaholics.

We haven’t gotten that kind of negative reinforcement this time around, which tells me that readers either like the new strips…or don’t miss B.C. and Shoe.

Hope it’s the former.

Outsourcing reporting?

 Calling from Mumbai

There is a lot of craziness in the business of newspapers today, but none more so than reported  in an Associated Press story out of Pasadena, Calif., where a guy with a local Web site has apparently hired a couple of “journalists” in India to cover Pasadena.

James Macpherson, publisher of the site, pasadenanow.com, said his outsourced journalists can handle the job from Mumbai or wherever, since Pasadena City Council meetings are televised. He said he got two reporters for the bargain price of $21,000 total. He didn’t mention benefits, of course.

His motivation is obvious. His two-year-old site has yet to make a dime. And it never will.

Sure, you can outsource luggage manufacturing, and even an increasing number of “knowledge” jobs. When I called an airline reservation agent last month, I was routed to India or Pakistan; I’m not sure which.

But the idea of outsourcing news coverage would appeal only to a publisher who knows nothing about news and politicians who would be held accountable for only what they say in front of a camera.

There is a reason why newspapers have the dominant news sites in most cities, this one included. Whether print or online, it comes down to having reporters who know their communities. And a lot of worn shoe leather.