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This GIF Shows the Evolution of the Breaking News From Orlando
When news breaks, editors must decide quickly how much coverage to give it. Is the story important? What are the broader implications? Will the situation get worse?
In a digital age, new information comes quickly. Our job is to respond to it just as fast. Stories are updated, photos are added, details are swapped in, then homepage editors give it increasing prominence on the website and apps to cue in readers to its importance.
The GIF above shows how The Times’s treatment of the Orlando shooting evolved as we learned more and discovered the scope of the horror.
“As you can see from the GIF, it went in stages as our reporters on the ground began to understand the immensity of the tragedy,” Ian Fisher, The Times’s weekend editor, said. “The day was directed by Julie Bloom, the weekend deputy who was one of the few people in the newsroom as the story was first breaking. As the initial, sketchy details came in, she published it as a small story in the middle column. Then it became the main story on the site. Then we went to what we call a ‘banner’ headline, which goes above the picture and is usually the largest headline.
“In this case, though, we needed to show more,” Mr. Fisher continued. “We stripped two lines of all-capital text across the entire homepage (moving down the Opinion section). That’s exceedingly rare — it happens once or twice a year at most. And, except for elections, it’s never news you might welcome.”
Steve Kenny, a senior editor on the news desk, had finished his shift an hour before the story broke — and returned to the office to help with the coverage. He explains how Times editors handled the story:
We knew from the beginning that this was going to be a significant story worthy of homepage play. But how much play? How big a story? It took eight hours before we knew the extent of the slaughter.
Most of our early news came from the Orlando Police Department’s Twitter feed, which, at first, just warned of a “Shooting at Pulse Nightclub on S Orange. Multiple injuries. Stay away from area.”
That post — and one from the club’s Facebook page that urged customers to get out and “keep running” — were the basis of our first story, which was five paragraphs long. We put it in the second position of what we call the “A column,” on the left side of the homepage. It went up at 5:11 a.m.
The story grew and was republished one paragraph at a time but remained in the second-lead spot until about 6 a.m., when the police reported that the shooting was a “mass casualty event.” At that point, we made the decision to move it into the lead position, but with a one-column head rather than a banner. We still didn’t have any specifics about what “mass casualty event” meant.
The story went from a one-column head to a banner at about 7:30 a.m., after the police held their first press briefing and announced that “about 20” people had been killed and 42 wounded.
The display remained pretty much the same for several hours. We still only had one story, but a live-blog and photos deepened the package. By noon, we knew about 50 people had been killed, and plans were put in place to give it a super-banner display stretching from one end of the homepage to the other.
The following day, we decided our most powerful image would be a simple grid of the victims’ photos. Lance Booth, one of our digital photo editors, put together grids of nine people each that we rotated in and out of the photo spot.
