Jeffrey McManus

A funny thing happened to NYTimes.com following the Minneapolis bridge collapse yesterday. The front page of the web site was festooned with the usual interactive feature, but they ran it as their feature above-the-fold image, which was unusual. The Times’ online interactive features have been getting better and better in recent years, but they’re often difficult to find. Today, you couldn’t avoid it.

But the thing that really grabbed me were the captions beneath the interactive piece — they wasn’t written by an editor, they were quotes pulled from the Times’ online message boards. It looks like they’ve been doing this all afternoon, rotating different quotes from community members in and displaying them beneath the interactive feature.

This is an interesting tactic and it’s not something I’ve seen NYT.com do before in quite this way (although the 24-hour news channels do it all the time — after 9/11, Katrina, and Virginia Tech, every camera phone is now a potential stringer). Since official sources aren’t yet willing to speculate on (for example) how many casualties there are and why the bridge might have failed so spectacularly, using community-generated content makes a lot of sense at this point in the story’s trajectory — everybody already knows the "what" of the story but nobody knows the "why." Disembodied voices on a message board might be just as good, or better, than CNN’s tired gallery of talking heads for hire.

I wonder if attacking a big story in this way is part of the Times’ standard disaster plan now — it doesn’t seem like this kind of thing could have been whipped up overnight.