An hour or so after shots were heard Thursday night in downtown Dallas, the Dallas Morning News’s website crashed. That left thousands of readers from around the world unable to access its coverage of the shooting that killed five police officers and left seven more people injured, reports The Washington Post.
What’s more, the shooting unfolded just a few blocks from the News’s downtown offices, leading to a lockdown of the building. At one point, police feared that one of the gunmen had holed up in a hotel next door to the paper. For a time, Mike Wilson, the News’s editor, was unable to reenter his own workplace.
At 9:06 p.m. Central Time, the paper said on Twitter that its news site was “slow loading.” The apparent problem: So many people tried to access the site that its servers were “overwhelmed,” Wilson said in an interview Friday morning.
Our website is experiencing slow loading; if you're having trouble go to our new beta site, which is loading faster: https://t.co/YX3RyZ8gLh— Dallas Morning News (@dallasnews) July 8, 2016
Via Twitter, the paper redirected readers to a “beta” site, one that the paper had intended to unveil Friday under less chaotic circumstances . The site, a redesigned version of the News’s existing site, carried some of the news that the paper’s staff was reporting.
However, readers who didn’t see the Twitter notification were repeatedly rebuffed in accessing the paper’s main site.
The newspaper deployed about 120 of its 270 journalists on the story, far more than any other local news organization, Wilson said. “I think it shows the great value of local journalism,” he said. “We do this at scale . . . Obviously, this was a seismic event for the city. You have to cover something like this with the kind of scale that we had.”
Thanks @ShepNewsTeam for recognizing the role of print's perspective with kudos to @smervosh and @dallasnews pic.twitter.com/naVbAzjB3K— Liz Jarvis Fabian (@liz_lines) July 8, 2016
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