On Track: The Washington City Paper's Coverage of the D.C. Metro Crash Rolls On

Let’s apply the grief cycle to the demise of print journalism.

Denial: The Internet? Who needs the Internet?

Anger: No WAY can unprincipled basement dwellers trump established media.

Bargaining: Okay, maybe it’s a good idea to get involved in this thing. But look, we’re only going to put what goes in the paper on our homepage.

Depression: Remember back before the Internet when journalism was great and everything was beautiful?

Acceptance: Who needs staff writers when we can hire unpaid interns?!

Thankfully, this mess is now old news: Newspapers are sinking or doggie-paddling, which means that those of us who care about them can move on to thinking about the future. And if the coverage of this past week’s D.C. Metro Disaster offered by the Washington City Paper (full disclosure: I’ve spent some serious time writing and working with these folks) is any indication of what that might be, things may just turn out alright.

The big question facing CP and it’s alt-weekly kin (now that the Craigslist debacle may have been somewhat reversed) is one of coverage: Pre-digital-times, these papers set themselves up as the counterintuitive, in-depth alternative to drab mainstream coverage. There and then, when the six-week hangout, 10,000 word cover story was an expected anchor, alts could beat their daily competitors by offering a flavor of nose-to-the-ground that more regular deadlines couldn’t dependably allow for. As the e-need for immediacy began to outweigh the stuff of feature-driven journalism (check out this super-prescient article from Ted Koppel), mainstream outlets could, even as they resisted the change, bring the full force of their daily-trained newsrooms to bear on delivering instant news-ish updates. Alt-weeklies, which had always been tooled toward deeper, longer thinking, found themselves strapped for content.

Experiments ensued. Blogs. Sex columns. Other such bunk.

It took a true catastrophe to remind at least one former Alt powerhouse of where it’s strength lay. As reports started to come out about what would become the deadliest accident in Metro history, CP had reporters furiously dropping posts. There were on-scene updates and photos, prompt reporting of death counts (and when the Washington Post failed to accurately update these, prompt criticism of that paper), wide-ranging coverage (including a really nice, early read of NTSB safety documents by Mike DeBonis) and live-blogging of multiple press conferences that provided both blow-by-blow and instant analysis.

In other words, to best the Post in the instant-coverage department, CP went back to its roots. Its reporters hit the city, stuck their noses to the ground, and came up with some excellent coverage. Of course, the real test will come as things calm down — and CP will have to decide if it’s going to use the lessons learned from Monday’s disaster for the doldrums of, say, summer in D.C.

Here’s hoping …