Temple: Story shifts from cable to Internet

Published August 19, 2006 at midnight

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INDIANAPOLIS - The day nearly 10 years ago when JonBenet was killed suddenly seems like yesterday.

Most of us, I think it's safe to say, felt like the case would never be solved, that it was over.

Now we're living it again.

And I'm in the strange position - at least for an editor - of watching news coverage from afar. I learned of the arrest of John Karr on my BlackBerry after getting off a plane for a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists.

And there I stayed all week, catching up with the story in stray moments. You're right if you're thinking that I found a way to come up with a few of those.

The distance gave me time to reflect on events in a different way than I would have had I been in Denver.

At the end of 1996, when I was managing editor of the Rocky, JonBenet quickly became the cable news story. She dominated TV screens for a host of reasons, from the beauty pageant video to the endless room for speculation left by the many mistakes Boulder police made in the first days of the investigation.

It may seem she is the cable news story again. And she is.

But I can see from here that something has changed dramatically since her death. What was once a cable story is now a Web story.

Yes, the talking heads are all over it. But now the story moves even more quickly. (I get e-mail alerts even in the middle of the night.) And local publications like the Rocky and The Denver Post aren't dependent on wire services bringing our findings to the attention of a national audience, which would hear our names on radio, TV and from the cable channels if they couldn't confirm our stories themselves.

It used to be that we'd publish in the morning and see our people on TV that night talking about their stories. What's known as the news cycle was still pretty clear. It worked like clockwork, and sometimes newspapers with their deadlines were victims of the clock.

Now a huge population has access to broadband at home, and even more have it on the job, where, I hate to inform other bosses, they spend part - right now it seems like much - of their "work" day surfing the Web.

The Web hasn't supplanted the old media. But the Web has added whole new dimensions for the public - and for the old media - that wouldn't have been possible in December 1996, less than a year after we launched RockyMountainNews.com.

Newspapers can now speak to a global audience in real time, once the province only of major broadcasters.

I'll stick with my own Web site to give you some examples of what I'm talking about, because I know the most about what's happened there over the past couple of days. But I could do the same with dozens, if not hundreds, of other sites.

The main JonBenet story generated more traffic on Wednesday than our entire site usually does on a typical weekday. The top eight stories on the site were about this case.

On Thursday traffic was even heavier. By the time most office workers on the East Coast headed home, we already had exceeded 1 million page views. More than 700,000 people visited -RockyMountainNews.com on Thursday. On Friday, by 8:30 a.m. we already had had more traffic than the entire Friday the week before.

Ten years ago, our Web coverage of this story was essentially the stories that appeared in the paper.

Not anymore.

Now our reporters write for the Web, and their breaking stories are noticed almost immediately by national sites such as the one run by Matt Drudge. You see video at our site. Slide shows. Copies of key documents. And a deep archive of coverage, focusing on key stories related to this week's developments, especially a 1997 major investigation by Lisa Levitt Ryckman headlined "Are they innocent?" and another from 2001 about master detective Lou Smit and the concrete reasons he believed the intruder theory needed to be taken seriously.

You see readers sharing their views on our site. You also see them interacting with our own equivalent of a cable-TV anchor, Mark Wolf, who runs the -RockyTalk Live blog on weekdays. One of his posts prompted 155 comments. Another 39. (But just to put things into perspective, another item drew 335 comments. It was headlined "Bed- wetting pampered liberals," about the gloves coming off in the governor's race, with Democrats going after GOP candidate Bob Beauprez's running mate Janet Rowland for her comment associating homosexuality with bestiality.)

Readers are even putting up their own links on our site to Web pages they want others to see. It wouldn't surprise me if the next thing we see is handwriting experts analyzing Karr's penmanship online, comparing a personal letter with the pages left by the killer in the Ramsey house.

We're in a new world, where the fascination with JonBenet's story remains just as intense, but where the public has more ways than ever to satisfy its thirst.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

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