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by Timothy J. McNulty
From the Public Editor
Chicago Tribune, February 29, 2008
The initial story of the deadly bicycle race Sunday was spare and
partially incorrect.
The three-paragraph report of a Chicago bicyclist killed riding through
a North Side intersection had only half of his hyphenated surname, and
it was spelled wrong. There wasn't even a mention of the "alley cat"
riders of Tour Da Chicago.
A fuller accounting of that accident came later, and it is a good
illustration of the evolutionary changes in news gathering that are
altering the way journalists work -- and the impact readers are having
on those journalists.
In the past, reporters who heard of a possible story were told to
interview as many witnesses as they could find, make additional calls
and knock on doors, all to gather more detail. They still do that kind
of "street-leather reporting," just as they rely on people to suggest
topics, tip them to events or point them in the right direction.
The Tour Da Chicago story and the richly detailed stories of the recent
shootings at Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech are all
good examples of reporting that sprung from another source: social
networking sites.
Young people are all over it -- they were the ones who started and
popularized networking Web sites with names such as Facebook, MySpace
and Friendster.
Now journalists are using social-networking sites as a tool that
combines the speed and reach of the Internet with traditional
fact-checking and, as with everything on the Internet, the absolute
need for healthy skepticism.
A Tribune metropolitan reporter, James Janega, and several other
reporters conducted sessions for their colleagues this week on how
journalists can use Facebook to reach out to people and their friends.
He explained how it also helps disseminate news and provides one more
place for journalists to post their reports. Even as many bemoan the
decline in newsprint, there is a growing hunger to share information
electronically. Some estimate the number of Facebook users is
increasing globally by 250,000 a day, adding to the more than 60
million active users.
The real story behind the article about the daredevil bicycle
competition began Monday, a day after Matthew Manger-Lynch died when he
raced through a red light ahead of about 40 other cyclists.
Looking at online reader comments and complaints about the brief police
report, an editor asked Karoun Demirjian to check for a possible
follow-up story. Demirjian picked up where most other news
organizations left off.
In reading comments on the Tribune site, she quickly realized that some
of the people had seen the accident. They described it in graphic
detail, and one person mentioned something about Tour Da Chicago.
This was turning into a treasure hunt, a mystery to solve. Demirjian
had no e-mails or phone numbers, just a hunch that she was on to
something with the reference to Tour Da Chicago.
A Google search revealed a My-Space page, but she couldn't read it.
Facebook and Nexis searches came up empty. Demirjian went back to the
MySpace angle, with searches revealing that some of these cyclists --
who, Demirjian wrote in a note to me, "seemed to foster this subculture
of hard-core cycling, emblemized by skulls and spikes and dark colors,
as well as daredevil street races" -- were on MySpace.
Her overture on MySpace resulted in a cyclist contacting her because he
recognized her name. Others had been told not to talk to the media, but
he offered to help and to find her some contacts.
"Basically, a brief spiraled into a story about cycling subculture, and
into tapping a whole network of underground riders that we would have
never known existed because I was able to identify these people through
their MySpace profiles and essentially spam them and their friends with
requests to talk," Demirjian said in the note. "Most did not respond.
But in the absence of phone numbers and e-mails, it was a point of
contact -- the only one -- with people from this community."
Ultimately, Demirjian's story about the accident included traditional
tips and telephone interviews with Manger-Lynch's widow and brother and
others involved in the extreme bicycle sport. She also explained the
stages and route of the race and talked with a critic of the sport, the
executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation.
Nearly 500 messages about the accident are on the comment board at
chicagotribune.com.
The conversations express sadness not only for the 29-year-old victim
of the race but for the driver of the sport-utility vehicle. Police did
not cite him; he was apparently trying to avoid other cyclists
streaming through the red light.
This was a tragic story that had so many human connections for so many
people, and the Tribune could not have told the story without the
enterprise of a reporter skilled in tapping into social networks.
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