They had a marathon in these parts today. That meant I had to get up at 4:30 to go run just so that I WOULDN'T get forced off the road by the "real" runners. I ran while they were setting up, and then I came back and worked, because, with the main road past our neighborhood, the only exit, blocked, I wasn't going anywhere. And I didn't. I worked, and then... I crashed. Hard. Lay down for a second on the couch and woke up hours later.
And by then, we could escape, so we went and grabbed lunch and ran errands and grabbed dinner, and then came home and the marathon was long gone. But we'd seen ambulances heading down to the race when we left, and I wanted to see if anything had happened, so, naturally, I went to the local paper's website and... nothing. Just a pre-race article obviously written the day before. No results, no coverage. The Patch.com site covering the town had a few pictures but no other coverage, and just directed readers to a third-party results site with the lists of times. That's it.
That's awful. If "hyperlocal" is the future, it'll have to do better than not to wait and not to report on the actual event, an event that snarled traffic for hours in town. And the newspaper should be aware that the Internet audience is not served by slapping the print version content on the Web and not bothering to cover breaking news. So both the "traditional" media and new media just bit the big one on this.
I'd be shocked if I had any more expectations. This is the future of news? Oy.