Halo 3: We looked like n00bs getting headshotted with our week multimedia coverage.

Well, I have a rant today, and though it is about a week late, I still think it’s a valid rant subject.
Last week, Halo 3 came out. Now, this isn’t just business news. This game broke the record for all multimedia sales in a single day, breaking its own record set by Halo 2. That is some crazy worldwide news that has a huge effect on Columbia, since — as our article pointed out — people were lined up in droves throughout the night in front of every store that sold the game.

Now, I thought the reporter who handled the article actually did a great job. Quotes were gathered from multiple locations all over Columbia and the written section did a great job of capturing the craziness of this game premiere. Where we fell off was with the photo and the multimedia.

The two photos that accompanied the article were taken at Tiger Tech, on campus. Yes, it was the biggest game preorder in the store’s history, but when you have an article that is talking about businesses all over Columbia and the world, getting two pictures from Tiger Tech on campus seems lazy and doesn’t compliment the article the way it could. I know we aren’t the New York Times and couldn’t feature Halo 3 premiere photos from Japan, LA and New York City, but I think we could have done better than just Tiger tech.

Next, with numerous expensive video equipment around the newsroom now, I was hoping to go to the website and see tons of multimedia footage from gameplay video to interviews in line with different people from every store in Columbia. You’ve got pandemonium all over town, people in costumes and camping out, and while we have words that let people know that, we could have gotten some awesome video. We had 2 minutes of footage from Tiger Tech that aired a day or two after the article. Heck, I may be in advanced reporting, but gimme a call and say, “Yo Jim, you wanna take a camera out and interview some crazy Halo fanatics in line tonite for some online multimedia stuff.” “Heck yeah, sounds like a blast,” I’d say. Throw in a story credit or two for my final grade and we could have had every camera the newsroom owns out getting mad footage of this bonkers event. We could have at least linked some gameplay video from You Tube to the website.

All I’m saying is this was about the easiest event ever for us to go hog wild on multimedia with and we came up real short. You can’t get really fun stuff like this from school board and city council and when we finally get the chance to really go all out with the new toys I have been hearing about and really give our small town a cool local taste of an international story, we come up short with nothing but Tiger Tech stuff that makes this look like a Mizzou story and that’s it. Kudos to the reporter who did capture the feel of the event and hysteria on a local and international level, but man, we gotta back up a good story like that with the multimedia and photo to show this story isn’t just words, its an account of craziness that rarely visits this small town.

Ok…rant over.