HEY!

I’ve been working in news for a few years now and yet this Tesla story caught me by surprise. I had no idea it would strike such a nerve. Additionally, I think it’s interesting to look at how a story can evolve over several days online.

My friend Alex told me Friday night that he had photos of the world’s first Tesla crash that had happened just an hour ago. I was exhausted from a long week but I told him, hey, let’s put a couple of the photos on my blog and then see if the (San Francisco) Chronicle or Wired wants the story. Ironically, I had written a story for Wired last year, but I guess I was too tired to pitch the story myself. Anyway I posted the story with the photos and Tweeted it and went on with the weekend.

I guess I must have been thinking about other things because I didn’t mention it until Sunday to my boss Leo Laporte, who immediately talked about it on his nationally syndicated tech radio show and then on his top tech podcast TWiT. On this podcast was Digg founder Kevin Rose who said, “yeah, I heard about that.”

Alex and I continued to talk over the next few days and on Monday morning he was interviewed by EVcast while he was driving. Alex was using the speakerphone so he wouldn’t break the new California hands-free law (or, I suppose, get in a new accident and become part of his own story).

Later that day, Wired News interviewed Alex, he sent them some of his better photos, and they published the story later that night. It was also picked up by Engadget, the San Jose Mercury News, Dvorak.org/blog (Dvorak was also on TWiT 153) and others (but strangely, still not the San Francisco Chronicle, which surprised me).

Then the Engadget story got dugg by more than a thousand people, and lots of people have Tweeted about it and commented on multiple stories and blogs. It’s really evolved since Friday and Saturday, when a few commenters on my blog were arguing about whether it was a fraud or not.

Also, since the disagreement on TWiT 151 on the best methods of editing already-published blogs and the subsequent TWiT Live discussion Leo had with Rebecca Blood, I made an effort to see how I could properly update the original post by leaving in errors and yet adding new facts as they evolved across the Web very quickly. A good challenge and I don’t think the proper methods of updating breaking news blogs have been ironed out yet. I could have written a new story or new tweet each time I got a new fact, but that just didn’t seem correct. I wanted to keep the same URL rather than diluting it in the search engine.

At any rate, it was really interesting to see how the story evolved in the context of the overall modern news cycle.

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