Covering murder in a Web2 world

By ANDREW TRENCH

I’m very pleased with our newspaper and online offering today even though our coverage is centred on a ghastly story, the murder trial of Wendy Manthe who pleaded guilty yesterday to strangling her two children.

But this post is not so much about the story but about how we covered it. We are working hard to try and change our newsroom culture from a single deadline news cycle as our traditional print offering operates, to a rolling 24/7 news culture where we are breaking news constantly using the different platforms available to us.

This is what we did yesterday:

1. Online News Editor Jan Hennop headed to the East London High Court and was given permission by the Judge to cover the trial live on twitter from within the court. As far as I am aware this has never been done before in South Africa. Jan posted some riveting updates, describing tearful scenes as Manthe broke down as her chilling confession was read to the court;

2. We followed this through with fuller updates on our blog where readers began to comment on the events of the day,

3. Meanwhile, Tegan Bedser, one of our senior online staffers, was working like crazy putting an excellent multi-media presentation together using the tools on a brilliant website called vuvox.com. You can see the result of that work here

4. Back at court, our reporters Thanduxolu Jika and Sibongile Mkani were gathering material for a rock-solid print story for this mornings’ paper.

5. We kept the full text of the confession aside for the front page as well, knowing that there would be enormous interest in it;

6. At the same time we liased with our circulation department who pushed up our print order in anticipation of the story’s interest, and;

7. Our marketing department booked some live read advert spots on a regional radio station where we began marketing the story to be published in the paper the next day.

From a journalism point of view it was a really exciting day. The only elements missing, I think, were the mobile channel (we’re still working on our mobi site) and maybe some video, but our thin resources were already stretched so we had to cut our losses there.

I hope this will be of interest to others who are getting used to working a whole lot differently these days. I can be very challenging – and a whole lot of fun too!
This post originally appeared on my blog Dispatches from the Trench

* Andrew Trench is the editor of the Daily Dispatch and is married to the Grubstreet Gal. Lucky beast!

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