I must compliment the Cedar Rapids Gazette for their coverage of the flooding in Eastern Iowa. Their web site is excellent, what with them using the Google Maps API to link stories to particular locations, the radar storm tracking, and all the town-specific photographs.
Really well done.
Several years ago, the boneheads in charge of the Cedar Rapids Gazette took what had been one of The Best online newspapers in the late 1990s and walled it off. If you wanted any access to content then you had to subscribe. They've since reversed that decision in the past couple of years and opened things up a bit. It's really for the better.
Contrast this to the horrible and clunky Des Moines Register and Iowa City Press-Citizen web sites, which use some kind awful template that other Gannett-owned newspapers around the country have to suffer with. About the only thing good on the DM Register site are the short videos by John Gaps.
Worst of all has to be the Waterloo Courier, owned by Lee Enterprises. The downtowns of Cedar Falls and Waterloo are closed, along with all of the bridges across town, and the thing they're most concerned about is delivery of the physical newspaper.
No wonder Lee Enterprises (LEE) is doing so poorly. Their stock was $35.51 on February 16th of 2007. Today it is trading at a new 52-week low of $5.42. That's down another 25% in the past three and a half weeks.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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5 comments:
It is all that is on the news here in CR, but I doubt it is on the national radar anymore. I am still waiting for the main stream media to come out and do a story on how a state CAN prepare for a natural disaster. (like Katrina) And how the local FEMA can prepare and how a population can listen to the authorities (unlike Louisiana). Oh and how after all this flooding and chaos, I have seen 1 report of armed robbery (not looting). And can some lame celibrity like a rapper or an heiress say "President Bush did a good job with the disaster in the midwest". If he can be blamed for a bad response to a hurricane can he be acknowledged for a good response to a flood?
And where are all the volunteers from those hurricane stricken areas coming to help us clean up? They won't come. 1) they don't know where Iowa IS, 2) they know we are able to take care of it ourselves. 3) they really don't care.
Where the hell is Ashton Kucher coming out and saying "I grew up here, we WILL rebuild Cedar Rapids!" Yea I am not holding my breath.
And I realize it isn't exactly the same, but it isn't THAT different.
Uh, Roy, Katrina and this flood are so different I can't come up with an accurate metaphor.
No one has been trapped in their attic. No one has been swimming through raw sewage and chemicals to get to higher ground. No one is stuck on their roof. There aren't dead bodies piled up around the Five Seasons Center.
Check yourself. You sound like a fool. It's a bad situation, but don't compare it to Katrina.
Of course it's nothing like Katrina--local officials haven't been pocketing the funds meant to shore up the river barriers, local law enforcement showed up to work their shifts, and no one was trapped in their attic because they got off their butts and left when told to evacuate instead of sitting around bitching that no one was doing it for them.
And yeah, people are swimming through raw sewage. I shot the video myself.
If people are swimming thru raw sewage its their kids and dogs and they're too stupid to tell them not to play in it.
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