After a plane made an emergency landing in Chicago recently, the Associated Press bureau heard reports of fallen debris on a specific block. So what did they do? They used Yahoo! Maps, which lets you find businesses near a specific address, and began phoning them. Within a few minutes, they had quotes from eyewitnesses.
This is such a simple, yet valuable, use of the Web that I asked AP business writer Dave Carpenter to explain how they did it. Here is his account:
Thank you David.
When our office (Chicago bureau of AP) heard that an American Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing at O’Hare on the afternoon of Sept. 16 because of an engine that had gone up in flames (from what turned out to be an unfortunate encounter with a hard-body cormorant), we leaped into full post-9/11 mode. After determining that the plane had indeed landed safely, with no injuries, we went to work to track down reports that pieces of debris from the engine had fallen in the suburbs near O’Hare.
While a reporter and photographer scrambled to the general vicinity, we worked the phones to try to find out specifics. Skip Stewart, the supervisor on our Photos desk, heard on a police scanner that residents had called in to say some pieces had fallen in a park in Niles. They mentioned the park name but no address or street names. Skip used Microsoft’s Streets & Trips software to zoom in on the park and tell our shooter how to get there.
Meantime, news editor Jim Webb assigned editorial assistant Mark Donohue to use Yahoo! Maps to find out what businesses were in the vicinity, which Mark did by punching in the two biggest intersections next to the park. He compiled a list by clicking on Food and Dining establishments, Shopping and Services and right on down the list, getting business names and phone numbers to turn over to reporters.
After we split up the list between myself and another reporter, Tara Burghart, I called the first business on my list and, presto!, the manager who answered the phone at a UPS store said a big chunk had fallen right outside his store. He hadn’t personally heard or seen it but described what his customers had told him — a quote that AMs supervisor Stacy Morford incorporated high into Maura Kelly Lannan’s story. It was on the wire within an hour and 50 minutes of the piece hitting the ground, along with some other quotes. An added bonus: The manager even agreed to my request to track down customers who were eyewitnesses, and called me back a few minutes later to give me a phone number that connected me to one.
I think most of us knew this tool was available but this exercise really hammered home its value to us and will make us turn to it immediately in the next crisis (not to mention pizza delivery). It was like a miracle to dial the phone and hit paydirt with my first attempt, based simply on a park name cited on a scanner.
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