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Loughborough Churnalism and Seismic Shocks
Posted on 27/02/2008
P. Klein
In a Murdoch era where journalists are being accused of Churnalism, where 80% of news reports are provided through press releases from PR agencies and the emphasis on papers is to give the audience fun and frolics, it’s good to see a Loughborough business doing something different. However for this particular Loughborough company their departure from Churnalism brought both success and problems through popularity at the same time.
Nearly the whole country by now is aware of the tremors that rocked the country for between 5 and 20 seconds just before 1am this morning. The four people who are involved in the running of this site, inLoughborough.com, were no exception. Realising that this was the biggest thing that has shaken the town of Loughborough for some time they decided to write a quick news story detailing what had happened and document history. Quotes were quickly gathered from people around Loughborough who had gone into the street, friends and colleagues in other parts of the country were contacted to see the extent or if it was a local phenomena. This information was then quickly poured into a news article and made live.
Within a couple of minutes Google had picked up the news story from the site. A Google News search for earthquake gave the inLoughborough story in poll position.
Paul Klein said:”We went round with big smiles on our faces. We were the first to get it in print and had more details and facts in our story than were starting to appear on Sky News at the time. However we could hardly stop laughing for the next hour when we realised what was happening”.
What was happening was that the site which concerns itself with news in the Loughborough area had become of interest to the whole country.
Rhys Reed said: ”The traffic was absolutely incredible. We were watching the log files grow faster than we’d ever seen them expand. At one point there was over 50 requests per second going into the server. We split our sides laughing as we had to hit the power switch and restart the server”.
What had happened is that the amount of internet traffic on the dedicated server had cause it to crash. It seems in the 21st Century the popularity of a website is measured by if it is brought down by its users. The team at inLoughborough are already identifying how they can make changes as part of a new contingency plan to ensure the next time there is such an occurrence the server can cope.
Whilst the days of the investigative journalist are over (and might be the result of myth making nostalgia anyway), it’s good to see that a small group of people from Loughborough can get there articles out to the wider population quicker than the dedicated national news teams.