Metropol

Thought I'd better start a thread on it. Did anyone else feel it? I'm not too far from the epicentre, and the house shook like hell!

Nick, there was no need for that!

Sure, blame him for something bad why not?

I did feel it and won't go much further than that as it'll be a repeat of the two slack-jawed threads over at the other place but with 73% more gay.

My dog knew it was coming 2 days ago! Don't mock that Nini!

Nini wrote:I did feel it and won't go much further than that as it'll be a repeat of the two slack-jawed threads over at the other place but with 73% more gay.

Fabulously put.

Seriously, people act as if it's the most amazing thing to have happened in their entire lives. So the earth rumbled slightly... so what? Areas of the world suffer mass devastation when *proper* earthquakes happen... here in the UK we talk as if it was catastrophic, whereas the reality was that it was bugger all. Nowt. Pish. Bobbins. A total non-event.

Seeing as my limbs are all intact, and the house is oddly still in one piece, I'll carry on with things as normal...

The hotel shook...or rather the glass walls of the atruim vibrated... I thought it was just wind and / or cold making them move, but now I know what it was.

That's in South Wales, so it travelled a bit.

I like how the BBC article has coughed up some slightly better citations (than “It was so loud I actually woke up”) than the ones it produced at 2AM. It took a good 15 minutes after the event for it to appear on BBC News’ website, though, with some really pathetic reporting consisting of about three paragraphs saying no more than anyone already knew.

cdd wrote:It took a good 15 minutes after the event for it to appear on BBC News’ website, though, with some really pathetic reporting consisting of about three paragraphs saying no more than anyone already knew.

Exactly what would you have expected to see on the BBC News website 15 minutes after it happened?

marksi wrote:

cdd wrote:It took a good 15 minutes after the event for it to appear on BBC News’ website, though, with some really pathetic reporting consisting of about three paragraphs saying no more than anyone already knew.

Exactly what would you have expected to see on the BBC News website 15 minutes after it happened?

Well, firstly I would expect to see something on the website before I was told about it by other people (my point is that nothing was on the website while 15 minutes ticked by), and secondly a higher quality of journalism than three short paragraphs, the first two merely being repeats of each other ("the BBC has received calls of a quake") phrased differently and the third being some poorly researched drivel about an earlier earthquake that Google could have provided me with in seconds. I had to actaully look on other websites, namely the USGS which had information mere minutes after the fact, and provided me with the estimated epicentre which the BBC hadn't coughed up until this morning.

The current article is, as I would expect, very good, but for an organisation that is supposed to be on call to react rapidly to breaking news, I thought the fact that the abovementioned article remained for a good hour (and apparently took them ages to write!) is appaling.

cdd wrote:

marksi wrote:

cdd wrote:It took a good 15 minutes after the event for it to appear on BBC News’ website, though, with some really pathetic reporting consisting of about three paragraphs saying no more than anyone already knew.

Exactly what would you have expected to see on the BBC News website 15 minutes after it happened?

Well, firstly I would expect to see something on the website before I was told about it by other people (my point is that nothing was on the website while 15 minutes ticked by), and secondly a higher quality of journalism than three short paragraphs, the first two merely being repeats of each other ("the BBC has received calls of a quake") phrased differently and the third being some poorly researched drivel about an earlier earthquake that Google could have provided me with in seconds. I had to actaully look on other websites, namely the USGS which had information mere minutes after the fact, and provided me with the estimated epicentre which the BBC hadn't coughed up until this morning.

The current article is, as I would expect, very good, but for an organisation that is supposed to be on call to react rapidly to breaking news, I thought the fact that the abovementioned article remained for a good hour (and apparently took them ages to write!) is appaling.

Personally, I feel that getting from event to some sort of published story (even if as sketchy as the first updates were) in 15 minutes is pretty good going. For a start, presumably the domestic newsgathering operation is a little more sparse at 1am, and as daft as it sounds, for all they knew at the time, this could've been some mass Facebook-organised flash mob to call the BBC at a specific time and claim there was an earthquake in the Midlands.
It's always going to be verification that lets them down. We can all Google a couple of sites that satisfy a need for knowledge in our own minds, but does that meet the standards of what you'd want to tell the nation? The one point I would agree on is that they were sitting on a fairly vague article for quite some time, but I'd take 15 minutes for acknowledgement, and an hour for a decent write-up over kneejerk 'Breaking News' any day.

Actually their first report appeared to be based only on "calls", citing no other sources at all, not even their usual practice of linking to earlier stories. But you're right, I'm sure they did verify.

In any case, for a nationwide news organisation, it seems strange they should be relying on calls from the public in the first place for this sort of news. They should be placed at the relevant locations, surely?

They could have accurately verified a lot quicker though: this page existed moments after, and is by all accounts a credible source.

I agree that they probably do not have such active journalists working at that hour, but I really did think what they came up with was a little thin, and only improved maginally over the next hour. By c. 2.30 AM they had finally got around to linking to some vague "How Earthquakes Happen" generic article and added some poxy quotes about how noisy it was etc and that was it. They only came up with what I would consider an acceptable article by the next morning. For "breaking news" at the time, I might as well have not even looked.

So... it appears CDD wants there to be a BBC journalist in every street just in case something happens there, which would negate the reliance on the public to report stories and also expects the few people around at 1am to have an in-depth knowledge of every conceivable subject and be able to produce a fully-detailed report on the piece within 15 minutes. Yes?