Sad day in Blacksburg
April 17th, 2007 by Jon BarkanAs one that used to work in a newsroom, the old saying that, “Bad news is good news for us” makes me a bit ill, but it’s true. Problem these days in the 5-second news cycle is that newsrooms aren’t the only places to get information these days. If you go to YouTube and search Virginia Tech Shootings there are a few videos already up and more to follow. Technorati says that there are over 15,000 blog posts from the incident and there are 444 tags out there on it including videos and photos. If you have turned on your TV for five seconds in the last day, you couldn’t have missed it … never mind the fact that every famous news person from around the globe made it to tiny Blacksburg ASAP. Make time to surf the web for 15 minutes and check out what’s going on … Facebook and MySpace I am sure are going to be lit up with this topic over the next few weeks as well. And when you get home, I know it’s rare to take a second to be thankful for what we have, but stop and think about it. I was numb to all of it in my newsroom days, but these days I say often, “But for the grace of God go I.” Here’s wishing for no more days like yesterday and that a wonderful college town gets back to where it was.
April 18th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Dozens of support groups have already emerged on Facebook. One called “Always Remember Virginia Tech” has more than 20,000 members. The posts and photos are sad, but inspiring. This is proving to be a really powerful tool to unit college students around the country, with groups from Arkansas, Alabama and other schools rallying together to share their prayers and offer support.
April 23rd, 2007 at 8:43 am
I thought it was interesting that a good bit of the news coverage focused on ‘describing’ the victims was based off of their social networking profiles. It drastically increased the amount of information available for releasing…without having to wait for families to distribute the choice information that they wanted the public to know.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:32 am
based on Fast Company blog (http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2007/04/23/facebook_and_virginia_tech_a_new_normal.html) there are some privacy policies that are being ‘addressed’ for media that used Facebook content in their reporting information about the victims. I can only assume this would only be a bigger issue if the information was damaging and the families decide to sue.
The law must be related to the fact that Facebook is membership-based, and there could be some fine print involved when registering…