Reporting has changed; goal to inform remains the same
A reporter from The Record’s early years — or even one from 1990 — wouldn’t recognize our modern newsroom, but the search for truth and desire to inform that drove them also drives today’s journalists.
Changes in the profession can be illustrated by examining two fires among the many covered over the past 140 years.
When a house exploded in a quiet Kitchener neighbourhood on the morning of Aug. 22, 2018, the newsroom heard about it almost instantly.
The police scanner broadcast the chatter between first responders, while photos of thick, black smoke rising into the sky started to pop up on social-media sites.
The home, at 56 Sprucedale Cres., had been levelled.
Reporters and photographers rushed to the scene and began interviewing residents and sending photos and audio back to reporters in the newsroom with the click of a button on their cellphones and laptops.
Twitter feeds were furiously updated and video of news conferences with firefighters and police were streamed live from reporters’ phones through a socialmedia platform called Periscope.
While reporters and photographers collected information from the dramatic scene, editors and reporters at the office pieced together the information into an online story — updated multiple times throughout the day.
Meanwhile, stunning video of the moments that followed the explosion appeared on a Kitchener man’s Facebook account, illustrating how frantic and chaotic the scene was for neighbours and first responders. Another reporter tracked this man down through social media and interviewed him for a second story.
The Record’s coverage reached thousands of readers within minutes, thanks to the web.
More than 25,000 readers clicked on the stories on the Record’s website within hours of the explosion — all before a single newspaper had been printed. Reporters then spent hours compiling the facts of the day’s events and worked into the evening to deliver a comprehensive version of the story for the paper the following morning.
Compare this coverage to that of “the worst fire to hit the Town of Waterloo,” reported by the Daily Record in 1930.
Flames shot “one hundred feet into the air” and a crowd of more than 8,000 people gathered to watch as the E.O. Weber furniture factory was destroyed by fire on Oct. 24.
Around 4:30 p.m. workers first noticed smoke and fire in the basement of the factory at the corner of Willow and East Allen streets, near the city core. Firefighters from Waterloo and Kitchener responded but quickly realized the factory couldn’t be saved and began dousing nearby buildings with water to protect them.
No one was injured or killed in the fire, but at least 40 employees were suddenly out of work. The cause of the fire couldn’t be determined, but it started in the basement and spread quickly through the elevator shaft. The fire was so hot it fused the door on the fireproof vault shut.
Residents of the region would have had to wait until the newspaper hit newsstands the following afternoon to get a detailed account of the fire, alongside a single black-and-white photo of the building’s charred remains.
No immediate updates, no quick video hits or images posted online, no Tweets confirming there were no injuries or deaths.
This was the reality of news reporting in an era before computers, cellphones, Twitter and the internet — and before most people even owned a refrigerator.
Sharing the newspaper’s story with those out of town would have looked a lot different as well. Nowadays, an online version of a story can easily be shared with friends and family with a simple click on Facebook, or by copying and pasting a URL into a text message.
Twitter, Periscope, Facebook, smartphones and advanced tracking analytics. These are the tools transforming news reporting for the digital age, and they have changed the way journalists do their jobs. People are hungry for information, especially when a major event such as a fire or explosion shocks the community. It’s the job of the reporter to share that information as quickly and as accurately as possible.