• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 12, 2006

When the plane carrying Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor crashed into an Upper East Side high-rise yesterday afternoon, the city's professional journalists sprang into action. Newspapers and TV stations immediately sent dozens of reporters to the scene, to sort through the confusion.

At the same time, an army of creative citizens also contributed to the coverage. And, in a striking change from other major recent New York City events--say, the blackout of 2003, or even the subway strike last December--some mainstream media outlets solicited the input.

CNN, for instance, invited visitors to upload their photos or videos to the site. The picture gallery available on the site today offers photos of the fire raging in the apartment building where the crash occurred taken by neighbors. There's also a photo by Matt Berkson (presumably not a CNN employee) showing an entire block of photographers--amateurs and pros--standing alongside the ambulances while taking pictures of the scene. (Still, the user-created photos on CNN.com are far eclipsed, in quantity, by sites like Flickr which, as of Thursday morning, had 380 photos tagged "planecrash.")

While the professional journalists did much of the legwork in piecing the facts together, their Web sites also left much to be desired. The site for local TV station NY1 was unavailable for much of the afternoon--as has happened during other major New York City events. Sites of the major newspapers were updated at least every half-hour, but that wasn't fast enough to keep up with the flow of information from the scene.

Instead, it was the blog Gothamist that came through, immediately sifting through and aggregating the new tidbits from professional reports--while also doing its own reporting.

The mainstream media obviously has the access and resources to get the story right, but events like yesterday's crash show once again that it has room to improve on the delivery.

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