Following the 8:15 a.m. shooting, seattletimes.com posted an AP item and linked to reports from the scene about an hour south of Seattle. But the staff quickly mobilized and began posting its own reports. The first e-mail alert was sent shortly after 10 a.m. Throughout the day, more than three dozen staff stories were posted or updated online. Seattletimes.com was the first to identify the suspect and detail his criminal history. (Only some original web pages and stories from Sunday are retained in our publishing system. This exhibit includes copies of stories and pages from our site and other sites that we were able to recover and copies of McClatchy-Tribune pickups of our online stories throughout the afternoon and evening.)
Late Sunday and throughout Monday, the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons took focus on Seattle, specifically on his aunt's home in the Leschi neighborhood. Photographer Cliff Despeaux, perched on a neighbor’s balcony, chronicled the hours-long standoff on Twitter, which was posted at the top of seattletimes.com. (We created #washooting, which became the region’s primary hashtag to track the story.) The home page – and Despeaux – attracted followers through the night as he described police using megaphones, tear gas and robots as they surrounded the home. But Clemmons eluded them. Monday and into Tuesday, police chased tips, identified hoaxes, searched homes and stopped potential suspects throughout the city.
Our best story-telling tools were digital: text, photo and video dispatches on the home page and the Twitter feed. And we experimented with a new tool to engage the community: Google Wave enabled participants to update the story and a map, linking to road closures, school lockdowns and police activity. Meanwhile, we integrated updates, a timeline, map, photo and video content into a Dipity tool on our site to enable users to interactively track the story.
A reporter tracking the case Monday night/Tuesday morning learned that police may have shot Clemmons within moments of the 2:45 a.m. shooting – as did a reporter who was tipped by a law-enforcement source. The facts as they unfolded were posted online and on Twitter. The first tweet was posted at 3:08 a.m. The photographer on the scene recorded and posted a raw video clip through Twitter. It was posted online at 4:50 a.m.
