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One way TV news websites have got to improve
Posted By katie allison granju
It’s hard to believe that any honest-to-goodness television news website still has stories on it reading like this one, but the reality is that many still do:
We broke the unbelievable story last night of a 10-year old girl in St. Anthony who gave birth to a baby.
She’s now one of the youngest kids in the country to become a mother.
Residents both on and off camera were shocked and in dismay over the situation, today this is what they had to say about our story.Jim Ker, shocked resident: “I think there’s a lot of sick people out there.”
Holly Theisen, upset resident: “Somebody would end up getting hurt by me if that was my kid and I’d probably go to jail.”
Kaity Dolezal, shocked 15-year old: “It’s really sad a 10-yearold gave birth after being rapped.”
Theisen: “That’s a ten year old. That’s a baby and baby shouldn’t be having babies anyway.”
Shynne Angell, upset 19-year old: “She should be outside playing with other kid. For something like this to happen to her I feel bad for her.”
Ker: “They’re not old enough. Shouldn’t have kids raising kids.”
Dolezal: “I’m fifteen. Can’t imagine getting close to doing something like that.”
Theirsen: “Disgusting . It’s sick. It’s sad. It’s kind of embarrassing to our town even.’
Lyle Rumsey: “I don’t think anything is wrong with our town. I just think something’s wrong with that person.”
That person is this man, 37-year old Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez.
Juarez is actually an illegal immigrant, and is now behind bars in the Fremont County Jail on other rape charges.
Since we broke this story exclusively yesterday, we’ve been checking with sources throughout the North Valley for more information.
The criminal complaint against Gutierrez-Juarez says the rape of the 10-year old happened between November and January. As we told you last night the girl gave birth at Madison Memorial this weekend and both mother and child are doing well.
If convicted the illegal immigrant could face life in prison, a $50,000 fine ,or both. Whether he ever serves anytime behind bars will be up to the judge who if he places him on probation, could deport him.
(I cut and pasted that snippet from the story in whole. I didn’t change a word, or any of the formatting. That’s how it appears on their website.)
Although the distinction between broadcast and newspaper news websites is blurring - and will likely eventually become meaningless - the dividing line still exists today. Each branch on the journalistic tree has its strengths; newspaper sites do some things better, while TV sites do other things better. As a rule, newspaper websites still draw bigger traffic in markets where TV sites also operate (of course, that’s not always the case 
)
TV sites generally work with a much smaller staff (you would probably be surprised to learn how few people actually work in a TV newsroom). Additionally, TV journalists are trained to write for viewers, not for readers, so they generally have to completely re-orient their work in order to publish clean, readable copy online.
A few years ago, most TV news site copy read like the stuff I just posted above, which is clearly a slightly modified TV script that someone slapped up. But the standard has long since moved past material like this; online readers expect more, and have too many choices. Our writing has to improve, just as the quantity and quality of multimedia materials has to improve on newspaper sites.
Even the best TV news sites generally have some examples of writing that needs work; we are operating in a fast-moving environment with a skeleton staff, many of whom have never written this sort of copy before. But we’re getting better every day.
The journalist of the future should be trained to write for both readers AND viewers/listeners. She should also be able to shoot video, do some multimedia editing, and participate in online community. Very few people have all these skills just yet, but again, we’re getting there.
May 8th, 2008
Newspaper writing isn’t optimized for the Web as well. I kind of wonder if if a techrunch.com or tmz.com blog style format is what we’ll get to as the best way to present news on the Web.
Yeah, but that above is beyond “not optimized for the Web.” It’s just terrible by any standard.