E-media slow to react to California quake

I got an early report of the earthquake near the Mexico-California border today via an e-mail from a friend who lives in San Diego. When I turned on the television to check the cable news stations, there was virtually no information about the quake except on CNN where the downsized B-team was evidently working the Easter holiday shift. Not exactly stuff that would make Walter Cronkite proud.

The latest trend in the media is to let average citizens do the journalistic legwork while allowing most journalists to have the weekend off. That strategy, however, is no substitute for getting images from professional photographers and eye-witness accounts from trained observers/journalists. I saw none of that in the first few hours after today's quake. What I did see was amateur video taken by housewives and children that failed to accurately depict the event and a CNN anchorman who didn't seem to have a grasp of basic geography. It was frustrating to watch a newscast that lacked the most basic information.

As the aftershocks were mounting, FOX News continued to ignore the story entirely, leaving me to think that newscast was prerecorded. When the smiling anchor on FOX finally acknowledged the quake, she didn't seem to comprehend the potential newsworthiness of it and quickly returned to other news that was nothing more than scripted fluff and rehashed stories from the previous week. She didn't appear nimble enough to switch gears. But she had a great smile. And through the aftershocks, the mainstream Web sites weren't on top of the story anymore than TV talking heads.

You would think that after some catastrophic earthquakes lately, a quake near a major U.S. city would draw a greater sense of urgency from the electronic media. This should be when e-media is at its best. I've heard a lot about newsrooms allegedly being 24/7 operations in this new technology age -- about media companies being more competitive than ever. Yet, I saw little evidence of that today. The news out of Southern California trickled to the East Coast today like back in the days of old teletype wire machines. Where was the immediacy and journalistic credibility in the early hours? Tomorrow's traditional newspapers will probably have it covered, particularly in places like San Diego and Los Angeles, but the electronic media was slow to react today, leading me to wonder about the staffing and leadership at these news outlets.

This wasn't a Haiti-type earthquake. Maybe there was no need to call in Brian Williams to man the desk at NBC or get the webmaster out of bed to redesign the home page. But it was another indication that while the storytelling tools of journalism improve, the actual timeliness, professionalism and accuracy of electronic media leaves much to be desired.