Omaha Paper Blankets Mall Shooting -- Web Traffic Demand Delays Site

By: Joe Strupp With President George W. Bush in town Wednesday, The Omaha World-Herald was already in a minor news-coverage frenzy before the deadly mall shooting that left nine people dead and five wounded.

"That occupied a lot of our staff, we had about 20 people on the road because he went to several places," Assistant Managing Editor Jeff Carney said about the Bush visit. "We had just closed the afternoon edition and were turning our attention to the first edition of the morning paper when it happened."

What happened was the worst single-day murder spree in state history when the alleged assailant, Robert A. Hawkins, killed eight people and then himself.

Carney, a 12-year World-Herald veteran, said Bush's plane out of town had "wheels up close to 1 p.m. and the shooting happened at 1:42 p.m." When word first broke of the shooting at a nearby mall, the paper sent about 10 staffers, and eventually had at least 50 of its nearly 200-person newsroom on the story in some form.

"It was all-encompassing, it included and touched many people from all departments," said Carney, whose usual 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. day stretched until about 1:30 a.m. "We had just had the president here and that would have been on the front page, but all of that got moved back to state and local [pages]."

Colin Conces, who usually covers business news, said he was drafted into videographer duty and spent time shooting images of the scene. "I was just sort of thrown into this," he told E&P. "There was a lot going on."

On the Web, massive traffic demands delayed, and, in some cases, denied access to the site where stories, comments, video and photos were updated. In a note to readers, the paper stated: "The Omaha World-Herald's Web site, Omaha.com, was overwhelmed with people trying to get information on the 1:42 p.m. mall shooting Wednesday. As a result, many people going to the site experienced slow response times and messages that the server was not available."

"Thousands of people were simultaneously trying to get to Omaha.com," Colleen Schinker, the paper's technology manager, said in the note. "The site never went down, but many people could not get to the site."

The paper said that additional servers had to be added to handle the traffic overload, while editors "turned off advertisements, video feeds and other features to speed access to the site." Efforts to get on the site were still met with delays this morning.

Bloggers monitoring the paper's Web site weighed in with complaints that the traffic problem was much worse than the paper contends.

"Omaha.com, went down at 2:15 p.m. due to heavy visitor traffic. It resurfaced shortly after 5 p.m. with a story, a video and a link to a new?[blog] that contained a single posting," stated Omaha City Weekly Media Watch.

Reflections of a Newsosaur, a blog by veteran newspaperman Alan D. Mutter, added, "The Omaha World-Herald was caught completely flat-footed today...producing the worse (sic) online coverage in memory by a newspaper with a major story breaking in its own backyard."

World-Herald Web editors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. No specific traffic numbers were available yet Thursday.

Adding four pages to its usual eight-page first section, the paper provided six pages of coverage and devoted the entire front page to the shooting with the headline, "It happened to us.' There was also clear reference to other mass shootings in the black bar underneath the head, where the names San Ysidro, Killeen, Columbine, Red Lake, Amish School, and Virginia Tech were placed.