Editors on Edge in a Changed World

Editors on Edge in a Changed World
But once the all-clear sounded in global newsrooms – "no terrorist intent" – attention quickly turned elsewhere,
and the reporters and editors (and photo, video, graphics, design and map teams), all on high alert, were told to stand down.
Then, I alerted my boss, Michael Slackman, the international editor,
that a significant story might be developing, then warned Mark Getzfred, who was overseeing the next day’s newspaper, that the front page might need to redrawn.
Last Saturday evening, when a single tweet surfaced, in Dutch, stating
that a car had plowed into pedestrians at Amsterdam’s central train station, I immediately prepared for the worst.
My colleague, Jake Doherty, an editor in New York, quickly found the official Twitter feed of the
Amsterdam police, which confirmed five or more people had been injured by a car at the station.
Within a few minutes, our European reporters began responding, including Christopher Schuetze, one of our Dutch stringers, who soon learned
that the country’s police were saying there was no indication of terrorism.
But in this new age of terrorism — after Nice, and Berlin
and London — a single tweet, in a foreign language, hinting at such an event, can trigger the mass mobilization of journalists.
Until very recently, a vehicle striking pedestrians in the street thousands (or even dozens) of miles away
almost certainly wouldn’t have registered as the tiniest blip on a big news organization’s radar.