This tweet met me when I opened up the Twitter this morning:
Today's sign of the newspaper apocalypse: YNP's 4.8 earthquake occurred 24 hrs ago, and still no word from the @bozchron
— The Bozeman Magpie (@bozemanmagpie) March 31, 2014
It seems there was an earthquake in Yellowstone over the weekend, the biggest in three decades, in fact. And as it came along with a swarm of other earthquakes, people (and the media) naturally assumed a connection to the supervolcano.
Scientists say there is no danger of an eruption, but as Blake Maxwell at the Magpie points out in his tweet, there was no way to know that from the Chronicle, until I got into the office this morning, that is.
I’m not sure whether Maxwell is right about the lack of this news from the Chronicle being a sign of the newspaper apocalypse. But still, other news organizations got it out over the weekend while we didn’t — even the Magpie managed to “cover” it by linking to an AP story in the Flathead Beacon in its aggregator.
(In fact, considering that the story has been on the Associated Press for some time, I was surprised to find that it hadn’t moved onto our site yesterday. I’m going to look into why that didn’t happen.)
In reality, it was a minor quake in a sparsely populated area that barely shook anything in West or Gardiner, and there were no reports of damage or injuries. Objectively, it really wasn’t all that newsworthy, my inner defense mechanism says.
And while that all may true, determining newsworthiness isn’t a 100-percent objective process. The quake was a story people would have read — had we carried it and shared it widely. It is, therefore, something we should have had sooner.
There’s no way around the lack of a Monday paper, not unless the company’s profits suddenly soar and stay up consistently. And with no Monday edition to put out, there is of course little justification to staff the newsroom fully on Sundays, which means that we’ll be weak on that day. It’s a fact of modern newspaper life — not necessarily a fact of the newspaper apocalypse.
Yet even a skeletal staff should have been paying close enough attention to hear about the Yellowstone quake. Even if they didn’t feel it shake, they should have felt it newsworthy.