Buried beneath snow for more than 24 hours, New York-area airports turned Tuesday to the growing backlog of canceled flights, an accumulation that could take far longer to address than the blizzard itself.

Several flights that arrived at Kennedy International Airport — including an Icelandair plane and a British Airways plane — were stuck sitting on the tarmac for hours until their gates opened. Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said some planes waited four to eight hours; a Cathay Pacific flight sat on the tarmac for 11 hours.

I read this bylined, New York Times story, on page two of today's (printed) Seattle Times.

As I read it, I kept shaking my head: the story is full assertions without sourcing and generalities. It also raises more questions than it answers and assumes its readers are, to put it mildly, idiots, in that it also contains "obvious" assertions.

(1) Sourcing: There is one source given for the 11 paragraph story. It's quite possible that the source, a Port Authority spokesman, provided all of the facts in the story. We simply don't know.

(2) Generalities: There are many, too many: "growing backlog" of cancellations, "many" flights were canceled, "several" flights sat on the tarmac, "some" passengers Tweeted, "the better part of the week" may be needed to get [an unknown number, not even an estimate] stranded passengers to their destinations. No sourcing needed, I guess, since all of these claims are, umm, nebulous.

(3) Unanswered Questions: The primary focus of the piece (as it ran in the Seattle Times) is that planes land and then are stranded on the tarmac with no gate. We are given two anecdotes (outliers?) but nothing to put the anecdotes into perspective: were these exceptions or the rule? There is no data on percentages or average wait time or when the strandings took place in relation to one another.

The spokesman asserts that the "flight crews" departed without "making sure there was an open gate" ... but the reporter tells us nothing about this process. Logic tells us that there won't be an "open" gate when a flight leaves Hong Kong or Iceland, so what, exactly, does this claim mean? And who makes the decision to depart a gate -- the pilot? Given my experience with weather-delayed air travel, I'm guessing that there is something in the maximum time a flight crew can be "in cabin" playing into the departure time ... and that the decision on when to have the flight crew board the plane is made by someone higher up in the airline food chain than the "flight crew" (which includes flight attendants).

The story also cites Department of Transportation data on how full flights have been in 2010, "fuller than at any similar period since the Department of Transportation began its tracking." And how long might that be? Five years? Ten years? Twenty? Needless to say, there is no link to the DoT data. We don't even have the name of the report, and it's not in the Passenger and Cargo Statistics section of the FAA website nor does it appear to be at BTS. Both sites have data going back only 10 years, BTW, but they don't seem to have these data. #fail

(4) Obvious: "The trouble for airlines lies in finding new flights for delayed passengers." I'd call it a "challenge" but this is so obvious as to make one wonder why it's included. Coupled with the vague nature of the DoT data, the information is meaningless.

Not Like The Original

After I looked at the story on the New York Times website, I saw that part of the problem with the article as it ran in the printed Seattle Times stems from selective removal of more than half of the paragraphs in the 28-graph story ... as well as selective graph relocation (graph 2 in Seattle Times is graph 10 in New York Times; graph 3 in Seattle Times is graph 2 in New York Times). Should the Seattle Times piece have had the byline? I'm not sure; for certain, it should have included some comment that it had been edited, if not who had edited it. How often does this happen with no disclaimer? (My guess is more than I want to know.)

However, the issues with sweeping generalizations? They punctuate the original story as well.

Solutions?

There are at least two issues here. The first, basic news reporting (the weaknesses in the original story), I'm going to set aside. The other, reporting in a connected world, I'll address.

Today, most "news" that is contained in printed newspapers is not "new" in the "breaking news" sense of "new." That's clearly the case in this NYT story. In fact, that's one way we can deduce that the "waiting on the tarmac" angle of this story is not only anedcotal but minor: if most of the incoming flights had been stranded with no gate, that would have been "breaking news" and the entire tenor of the original story would have changed. (One would hope, also, for better facts-and-data and sourcing.)

The challenge for newspapers is to create a product that "fits" the column inch constraint of the printed version while simultaneously producing a product that is unconstrained by length and capable of being connected to a global information network. It's not a small challenge.

However, there is a clear distinction between stories that originate with a news organization and those that originate from wire services. In the case of the former, it seems clear to me that online replication of the story as it ran in print is both appropriate and necessary on the publisher website. But for wire stories, the replication isn't as straightforward but it is critical in today's networked world.

For example, in today's Seattle Times, the first "section" of the newspaper (which includes "business" and "op ed") contained 23 "news stories" plus two wire compilations of shorts. Of those 25 stories, only three had local bylines. Thus, figuring out how to best replicate those wire stories on the website is not an academic exercise. Neither is advising the reader -- in print or online -- of how local editors may have trimmed those original stories, either for a print or online edition.

In addition, the Seattle Times article doesn't contain the correction posted sometime today, one consequence of today's disjointed publication process:

An earlier version of this article, relying on information provided by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, referred incorrectly to one airline whose plane sat for hours on the tarmac at Kennedy International. The plane belonged to Iceland Express, not Icelandair."

Some tips on making news meaningful in a connected world:

• Run locally-produced stories Just Like they ran in the print edition of the newspaper (but with links, of course). Provide additional information via links to supplemental stories, not via a "longer" online story. Create a template for "more information" so that readers know where to look to learn more.
• Disclose when a wire story has been modified, even if that modification is the deletion of a single paragraph.
• At a minimum, link to the original wire story, the primary source. In a perfect world, write an excerpt and redirect readers to the original story rather than simply replicate it whole (or partial) hog. If everyone did this, would that not drive page views for the primary source? Make any firewall speed bump "disappear" for anyone who is linking to the original article, that is, anyone who is sending you traffic which means they are sending you money; then share that revenue (this means bloggers, too) to give them an incentive to send readers your way. (Yes, that's you WSJ and NYT.)
• Get the code jockeys to figure out a way (RSS?) to automagically alert websites that are referencing a story when that story has been edited ... and have that alert automagically appear on the referring website.
• Link To Source Material! I feel like a broken record ... and I don't care if your print paper content management system has yet to be "fixed" so that embedding links is easy. It's almost 2011 ... news organizations have had PLENTY of time to fix their software. The fact that they haven't speaks volumes about management myopia.

FWIW, I'm getting ready to cancel my print subscription. Again. I'm not convinced that the convenience of getting the print paper offsets the limits; ditto the NYT on the Kindle, since it, too, gives me only part of the story. I think I may learn enough about what's happening in the world via my Twitter feed (which gives me trusted crowdsourced breaking news) and in each edition of The Week (which recaps, in a contextual way, major events around the country and world).