Flights of Virgin Blue were delayed or cancelled on Sunday due to their crashed down online booking system. I find two news reports about this issue from The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and ABC News, both published on 27 Sep on their websites. Let's have a look at how the reporters approach the news in different ways.
SMH report's title is ' Virgin Blue back online, but more delays expected'. A video clip from FairFax Media was put in the beginning and then a link to Virgin Blue official website and its hotline. This gave readers a quick access to updated information from the airline.
The whole report used the inverted pyramid type to send message. It gave the most important news at the beginning about how many flights were cancelled, how long the delay would continue, and how many passengers were affected.
The reporter cited an official statement from the airline to claim the current situation. Also, the reporter interviewed 6 person, including a spokeswoman from the airline, 3 involved passengers, a manager working in a bar in airport, and a manager from travel agency, all giving their personal experience about this issue.
Report from ABC was called Virgin ill-prepared for system crash, experts say. A picture shows on the right side in the beginning, followed with a video clip link, an audio link, a map, 3 related stories and a link to Virgin Blue website.
The report introduced the core message of this piece in black font that Virgin Blue should have had a better back-up system to deal with a technical glitch that forced thousands of passengers to be stranded. That's a deeper angle than the SMH report.
For the interviewees, this report had 4, including Virgin Blue operations manager, Cirkey's aviation writer, Australian Computer Society spokesman and Air Transport senior editor. The reporter chose experts, rather than involved passengers, to give their opinions about how this issue happened, who should pay the lost, and what is the best way to avoid this kind of issue in the future.
The report provided that Virgin Blue booking system was supported by Navitaire. However, it lacked the announcement from this company which would be very important to complete this story focusing on the computer problem.
As we can see, these two reports both did a good job to send message and inform readers. They focus on different angle; thus different interviewees and writing structure are introduced.
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