So did you also get the sense last night that basically no English-language news organization has people in Haiti? Of course it is going to be difficult getting news and information out of something terrible like this in the first 48 hours; totally understandable. Most on-scene reporting I would pretty much expect to be like "THIS IS HORRIBLE, GOTTA GO HELP SOME PEOPLE." But we're not getting that. And the second-hand news-the aggregation, if you will? Really weird.
The Times last night was bizarre! The Lede blog has taken over chief "referring readers to news" duties and this is what comes out.
Update | 11:59 p.m. My colleague Jennifer Preston has compiled this Twitter list of users of the social network who are in Haiti or providing useful information on the aftermath of the earthquake there.I mean, this could be worse! They could be telling me nothing. I mean, I'm not even going to turn CNN on, because, no. And, yes, I kinda prefer all that stuff above to this.
Update | 11:02 p.m. Tequila Minsky, a New York-based photographer who is staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince – which was the model for the Haitian hotel in Graham Greene's novel "The Comedians" – told my colleague Patrick Witty, a photo editor on the New York Times foreign desk, what she saw immediately after the earthquake. She had arrived at the hotel just two hours before the quake struck, shaking the walls of her room shook and knocking things off it.....
Update | 10:25 p.m. Thanks to a reader who pointed us to this partial list of Twitter users who say they are in Haiti compiled by the Los Angeles Times.
Referrals totally appreciated, by the way!
Remember that pause, of 12 hours of so, the morning after Katrina when people were all "Oh hey, looks like New Orleans missed the worst of it"?
We're in a slightly elongated version of that pause. Pause ...
OR you moron. ("mORon.")
Do not underestimate Tequila Minsky as a news source.
What about Patrick Witty's recaps?
Whiskey Valenciegos, reporting live from Havana!
Reuters is compiling sort of a live-blog from their correspondents. It's not bad. http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake-live-coverage/
Which I found here on the awl. Sorry. Hangover.
This summer I listened to an editor from CNN based in London breathlessly talk about how hard it was to sort through all the twitter and FB information as it came in from Iran post-election, and how they had to hire college students to translate and how it was so hard to know what was real and all.
I didn't ask, (because Iran isn't the best example, but Haiti, it turns out, is an excellent one) "isn't that the natural result of not having any correspondents based abroad anymore? You know, not having people on the ground who know shit about a country who can tell you what's what so you have to rely on interns to do your reporting for you?"
So, yah, this is it.
Yup. Yurp, Ayzha, and that Affruca are damn hard to keep track of.
Also disturbing: on AC360 a seismologist was telestrating the quake over a map of Haiti like he was a weatherman.
Um, "which was the model for the Haitian hotel in Graham Greene's novel "The Comedians"" Thanks Lonely Planet!
Also, when I heard Clinton say "we are committed to do whatever we can to assist the people of Haiti in their relief, rebuilding and recovery efforts." I wanted to punch him in the face for being such a hypocritical scumbag.
I have friends down there (in a hospital, but not THAT one) and am trying to get info from them. It's Haiti though. They often cannot even email on GOOD days.
Mini-fridge is a disaster area.I don't even want think about sorting all those mini bottles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456322.stm
All over Europe news organizations are shutting down offices or making correspondents or even stringers cover 2-3 countries. I read stuff about Spain in various US papers that would make me laugh if I weren't only choking with rage.
This is usually where the BBC shines, they have people everywhere. Not anymore?
They're doing better than most: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456322.stm
But their main article doesn't have any actual on-the-ground reporting. From what the article did say, if they do have correspondents there, they can't get through to them.
BBC is good only relative to CNN which is good only relative to Fox. Al-Jazeera is usually the best, but Haiti is a bit out of their sphere, unfortunately.
Oh but every anchor and correspondent I've seen on air so far has BEEN there before. They KNOW the neighborhoods, they even pronounce them correctly, especially the fancy areas with pools. In fact, if I heard Ms 1AM CNN Desk Reader say "Pourr eh Praaans" for the 50th time within 3 sentences, I was going to go to sleep. It's amazing the level of "Oh Oh Oh I've been there! But no, I don't know what's going on there..."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Just put it on your Favorites list. (They have a great English teaching portal. Make my life a lot easier.)
During the 2004 Haitian rebellion, I remember that no one had any had reporters or even reports out of Haiti, due to the general chaos. I was news director of my college radio station at the time, and I had one of my reporters call her uncle, who was some way a member of the Haitian government. One would think, you know, that you could similarly hit the phones to get some news, Twitter reports notwithstanding.
But since Haiti is on the same island as DR, I would think that Univision or EL Diario or whatever major latino channel would have people there, and possibly bilingual. Could they not try to broadcast in English, would the forces of evil block that?
It's less than 200 miles from San Juan to Port-au-Prince. Couldn't a journalist (in theory) just hop on a boat and get there? I mean, it's not like it's FAR...
Anderson Cooper is flying around overhead in a helicopter, tweeting. He brought two cases of water from the airport, and took the last flight down to the DR.
Meanwhile, I read reports of 50--count 'em--Chinese medical personnel dispatched to the scene.
Now, the Chinese, they do have people everywhere.
...everywhere with strategic natural resources.
It's a funny (not really) thing about the newspaper industry people always bitching about the internet took their moneys, etc., because news organizations deliberately began shutting down their news gathering operations about twenty-five years ago.
Maybe there was no real need for the LA Times to have, say, two or three full-time correspondents in Toronto. (And in the late '80s, they did.) Maybe there were a few African nations with not very much breaking news that you could serve okay with, say, one bureau in a regional capital city with good transportation and communications and a solid chief and a couple of good translators/fixers with heavy knowledge of the surrounding countries/cities.
I wanted to be Graham Greene filing three pieces a year from some crumbling colonial city or another and smoking opium and fucking hookers like most of you hanging out at The Awl and crying to Morrissey songs on YouTube today -- ha ha, how far we've come, etc. -- but always figured that required a fancy university degree and lots of contacts within the diplomatic corps and press club.
But by the early '90s, I noticed that a bunch of college dropouts from California were covering the Balkan Wars, as stringers, because the foreign bureaus were shutting down and the full-time w/ benefits correspondents were not being replaced when they retired. I ended up stringing for wire services, too, based on nothing more than a scratchy phone call. "Oh yeah so-and-so [another 25-year-old stringer and dropout] told me to call, I'm in ____, okay great I'll start filing stuff." It turns out *nobody* got to be Graham Greene ever again, and now you can't even find work as a $25-per-brief-we'll-pay-you-in-two-years-maybe stringer in some dangerous hellhole.
Remember when that Canadian radio program got kind of famous for just calling a payphone in some hot news spot because they had no budget or bureaus? Now that's the fucking New York Times, and the payphone is fucking Twitter.
Yeah, but this also means *nobody* ever has to be Graham Greene's wife ever again. Winners and losers.