A Look Back at Fukishima
IEEE Spectrum has a really good step-by-step look back on everything that happened at Fukishima in the hours and days after the earthquake/tsunami. This sort of reporting is really interesting if for no other reason than it’s generally really hard to find. For all the coverage you watched and read in the days and weeks that followed the disaster, the dropoff on any story like that happens fast. For all the talk about the public’s declining attention span, the media is just as bad. I mentioned this a few years ago, but I still think often about this quote from the 2008 Pew State of the Media report:
Rush Limbaugh’s reference to the mainstream press as the “drive-by” media may be an ideologically driven critique, but in the case of several major stories in 2007, including the Virginia Tech massacre, the media did reveal a tendency to flood the zone with instant coverage and then quickly drop the subject. The media in 2007 had a markedly short attention span.