The Daily Nebraskan is far from being totally Web-first … but we’re working on it.

Tonight, a hazardous material crew and other emergency responders were called to a residence hall at UNL, and one floor’s residents were evacuated while 11 other floors were put on lockdown.

Our newsroom’s traditional story flow would have sent this story to the Web at least five hours after the 911 call was made.

We got it up within the hour and posted at least three more updates throughout the night. We got video of the police press conference and photos from the scene.

It’s not flawless, and updates could have been posted more often, but I’m happy with the progress we made tonight.

We had breaking news, and we covered it like it deserved.

The takeaways from tonight:

• Communicate, communicate, communicate. When you have two reporters, one photographer and another videographer all out on the same story, everyone needs to be kept in the loop.
• The AP can be really slow sometimes.
• Breaking news on a Sunday can easily shoot up to the most-read story of the day within the span of a couple hours.
• A police scanner in the Web room would be a fabulous asset. The GChat message from a friend certainly got the job done, but it’d be nice to hear the news ASAP from the police.

[ Photo by Hilary Stohs-Krause, Daily Nebraskan ]

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