Covering the Bridge Collapse

AOL photo editors Chris, Miriam and I were settling into the routine of the night photo desk shift on a quiet summer evening last week. We were doing our standard thing – handling routine daily news, sports and entertainment photo coverage by completing photo requests as we received them from programmers and communicating mostly through IMs. 

 

Just after 7:30 PM EDT, Chris IM'd me: “Guy, FOX NEWS, bridge collapse in Minnesota. This is BIG.”

 

I switched to FOX at my desk in New York; Chris was in Dulles, Va. The New York FOX affiliate still had on a Seinfeld rerun. I flipped over to CNN, knowing it would only be a matter of minutes until they were onto the story. 

 

The three of us talked briefly, "Chris, you handle the collapse, while we clear the decks of sports, entertainment and other news requests.” Experience from covering large stories tells you, "do not drop everything, just get everything done." Sports still needs sports photos, etc. 

 

Within less than 10 minutes, Chris had the following image sent over to the news programmers. Note the brief caption. Just the bare facts:

 

Collapse in Minnesota.

 

By 8:15 PM, a mere 30 minutes or so after the first ALERT went out, Chris had sent out about eight images for a photo gallery. They were all grainy video grabs, but they served the purpose of Internet news (immediacy). This was all done all without a single photo request from the programmers.

 

This video frame grab taken from KMSP television shows a burning tractor trailor at the scene of a freeway bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Aug. 1. The entire span of the 35W bridge collapsed about 6:05 p.m. where the freeway crosses the river near University Avenue.

 

By 8:30, the first photos from the St. Paul Pioneer Press starting rolling in on the Associated Press photo wire. This is about how the timing always seems to work: about 45 minutes after an event, we'll start seeing still photos.

 

Rescue workers gather on the Interstate 35W bridge, which stretches between Minneapolis and St. Paul,  after it collapsed Aug. 1 into the Mississippi River during evening rushhour.

 

During that initial time, Chris was alone on the story, as Miriam and I cleared out all the other requests.

 

About an hour to 90 minutes into the story, the real barrage of photos hit. Every source started filing a multitude of photos. No pictures for the first 45 minutes, save for frame-grabs from TV newscasts, and then just a trickle of photos that turned into a deluge from each source from 45 minutes until an hour and a half after the story broke. Each source dumped about 40 pictures at once. Three hours after the collapse, we had hundreds of images to choose from. Keeping one editor as point person, we were able to update the gallery in a cohesive logical manner, avoiding redundancy. Chris also added a couple of historic images, allowing users to compare the bridge both before and after the collapse, which helped users grasp the full tragedy of the situation.  

 

We replaced early TV video frame-grabs with stronger still photos. Miriam and I looked at all of Chris’s photo selections, and we then scoured the feeds for better and different images.

 

Emergency workers carry the body of a victim from the scene of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Minn., Aug. 1.

 

By the time our shifts had ended, we had updated AOL's Welcome Screen several times, cut News main page photos and sent over maybe 20 photo gallery adds.

 

On a routine day, News and Sports programmers decide which stories they choose to build out. They then request images to support a gallery if possible. The key point is we're all working in the past. The story is already written and the photos are already taken. The photo editor then searches our varied sources for the best representation of images. Programmers pick the stories, photo editors pick the best images to help communicate the story to the public.

 

But breaking news, like the bridge collapse, is a totally different animal. You must follow the story closely. That often means watching several television stations simultaneously and quickly toggling between our varied sources as the story unfolds real-time.

 

A portion of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed during the evening rush hour in Minneapolis, Minn., Aug.1.

Within minutes of learning about the collapse, we were able to get a photo gallery up on AOL. Pulling images from every source we had available, we continued to build a detailed photographic experience for our users to help better understand the magnitude of the bridge collapse. 

 

Flipping through the gallery one last time before going home for the night, the reality of this event really hit home. We were moved by such powerful images and hoped that the numbers of dead and injured would remain low. 

 

The following day as we arrived for our shifts, we opened up an email that noted that more than 8 million times, people clicked their mouse through one of the photos we posted documenting the collapse. It's times like that when we really feel like we provide a great service informing the public of events as they unfolded.  A thank-you email from our director really made us feel great. She said, "Great work guys, and to quote my daughter as she flipped through the TV stations last night, 'the only place updating photos and info is AOL. TV is lame.' "
 
We couldn't agree more.

 

- Chris, Guy and Miriam