Will The Australian
reconsider the way it operates its online site from this morning? The
Fairfax sites had the recovery of the Beaconsfield miners up at 6.43am,
with a headline echoing the cry of Martin Luther King, “Free at Last”. The Australian
normally does not change its site throughout the day, treating it like
the printed version of the paper – once it has been “put to bed”,
that’s how it stays, until tomorrow’s edition is printed.

Given
that online media is all about immediacy, it’s an odd approach that has
never looked more out of step with the nature of the medium than it did
this morning. Applying old fashioned news values meant The Oz got beaten to the story, badly, though it’s good to see they’ve now caught up and are leading with the story on their site.

As if to underline the point, the NYTimes beat The Oz to the yarn, which was prominently positioned on the front page of the Times
site earlier this morning. Ouch. But the paper does have a strong news
angle on it, reporting that the Beaconsfield mine disaster could have been prevented if a basic safety measure to stabilise tunnels – the retention of key, unmined levels – had been followed, according to miners.