Fear of Flying

               

The terror raids in Britian early Thursday morning left newspapers choking in the dust of their speedier electronic media counterparts — our print editions were thumping onto people's doorsteps with the news of the raids a full 24 hours after the news broke.
Couple that with a dreadful dearth of real "terror" related art and you had front page designers across North America pulling their hair out. A plot to bring down up to 10 planes, killing thousands of people, was clearly big news, but how to cover it? A look at five fronts (the four Toronto dailies and us) shows some very different  thinking at work. And  no one was quite as differrent as we were.

In a real preview of the kind of reporting Spec editors see as a key to our future, we didn't blow-up the front page (the way the Post did). We didn't grab pictures of guys with guns and mate it to a Main 'wrap' story (the way the Star did). Nor did we drown the story in a flood tide of ink and columns of words, (Hello good grey Globe!).
Instead, designers here focussed on utility — how does this story affect me. Now.

Thus we led with a back-lit photo of a row of innocuous-looking consumer products (pop, water, toothpaste) that we're all banned from bringing aboard airlines. Beneath the photo an almost ironic headline: New Weapons of Terror. And instead of a story we ran a triptych:  bullet point updates, a list of banned goods and a short statement from our transport minister. On a day when you can be pretty sure most media is going to be verging on the hysterical, our approach certainly stood out.
Roger passed along this note he got from an American editor and swears it wasn't solicited:

Greetings Roger and Howard,
I am the readership editor at the Post-Standard in Syracuse, and I'm wrestling with a lot of the issues your newsroom did years ago.
If I may impose: Would you describe for me how your paper came up with today's A-1?
I loved it. I'm convinced the current structure/culture/whatever in our newsroom couldn't have produced anything like it. I am, however, lacking insight into how it happened in Hamilton.
Brothers, can you spare a few sentences of explanation?
Thanks.
Steve Carlic
Syracuse Post-Standard

So, we had a least one fan. But did we downplay this story? Could be be accused of almost making light of it?

I tend to like the weight we've given the thing, (although I think calling this thing a "sophisticated terror plot" seemed jarringly hyberbolic in the absence of any real evidence) and like that we're not doing the terrorists' work for them by spreading panic. But others may differ.

What think you?

Bill D

Comments

[Joan Walters]

I thought our new weapons of terror front was one of the best concepts I've seen in a while. Forget whether we would tweak this or twitch that and just think about why we may have done it that way. If our A-Section renovation is purposed to give readers what they say they need, then the most important point about the terrorism story is the one Bill D. made above. Our paper hit doorsteps about 24 hours after everybody knew almost every detail. And . . . it's been made clear that one of our new duties is NOT to be the source of hot national news, which our readers will get elsewhere, always. So giving them something useful and different in an easy-to-digest format as we did on Friday seems pretty basic. The decision to zero in on the products you can no longer take aboard a plan as the focal point was a good call, given that's what most people were discussing (in my world anyway), not who the terrorists were. And the recap and tutorial of the main points of the story on the front didn't take away from a reader's right to go inside for a deeper look (although maybe we could have made that option more prominent). All in, I thought it was brilliant.