Cruise Bruise Blog
October 5, 2009
October 5, 2009
Taking More Time To Post Cases To Cruise Bruise
As you know, recently Mike Groves was added as the Safety And Security Advisor to Cruise Bruise. This marked a significant change in the way cases are posted to this site.
First, with Mike to help do investigations, it has enable both he and I to spend more time working cases, trying to get the full picture and ultimately to get to the truth. We are now able to delved deeper into incidents of the past and present, and not be in such a rush to be the first to get a story out.
With the mainstream media, it is about who gets the story up first, who gets the scoop. This frequently results in mangled details, that often do not really reflect what really happened or are just such lame attempts to put a story up, important details are lacking.
I can give you an example of that. Recently, I saw a Twitter tweet by @CruiseVictims the Twitter account for the International Cruise Victims Association, regarding a story about the CCL Carnival Legend colliding with the RCI Enchantment Of The Seas in Cozumel, Mexico on Thursday, October 1, 2009.
Read that last paragraph again. In it, I managed to tell you which cruise lines, which ships, which port and what type of incident took place on what day of the week and date. I also told you who posted the story link and who that account represents.
The @CruiseVictims post references a baynews9.com story that says:
"A cruise ship's passengers returned to Tampa Sunday morning after a rocky time at sea.
The Royal Caribbean ship they were on was hit by a Carnival cruise ship that also left out of Tampa's port.
According to Carnival representatives, heavy winds pushed the Carnival ship into the other boat as it was pulling out of the Cozumel port on Wednesday.
Both ships were slightly damaged by the collision."
From reading the entire article quoted above, can you tell me which two ships were involved? No. This is one of the most important facts in the case, and it is missing.
It is this kind of reporting we try to avoid. As a rule of thumb we like to post:
- the date and day of the week the incident took place
- the name of the line(s) and the ship(s)
- the type of incident
- where exactly the incident took place
- the port the ship embarked from
- the port of calls for the voyage
- the names of victims
- the nationality or home county/state/town of victims
- age of victim(s)
- who responded/assisted
- where victims, if any, were taken after the incident
In sticking to this set of criteria, it is my hope that a complete picture can be painted. Beyond those facts listed above, we add other details to fill in the picture more completely.
There is no reason at all the mainstream media can not supply this information in their articles, other than they don't want to use and pay for the time resources required to gather all those facts. That is how you end up with a story about "a" ship hitting "a" ship.
To meet our goals takes time. If we rush to get the story up, many important details will be missing. I would rather we take the time to fulfill our stated criteria and gather many of the important facts in a case before posting. Sometimes, just waiting a few days, gives us the time we need to gather important information.
An example of that is the case of the half dozen passengers detained in Antigua after they failed to pay a taxi cab driver what he thought they agreed to, and when police confronted them, they attacked the police.
I waited a while to post that article and was able to get testimony from their trial that explained what really happened. These passengers were not the victims in the case, the police in Antigua were.
Today, those passengers, having plead guilty late last week, will be sentenced. This, after the media carried the story that the passengers claimed to be victims, attacked by men who did not appear to be police. First, "No, we are not guilty", then "Yes, we are guilty". Time will most likely bring the truth, as it did in that case.
It is a time consuming process to investigate cases. When we post them without the required information, it makes it hard to regroup when key information was mangled in the beginning.
Everytime I post a case of a passenger overboard and the name is not known, when the name becomes known later, I have to redo it all, with a new page and then remove everything already done. It not only doubles the work, but triples the work.
I do think having those overboards up quickly is important, as family members of those still aboard come to us wanting answers. It is worth it to me to compound that work, to get the news out. But, in other cases, less significant, though important none-the-less, we are going to opt for gathering the key facts, then add the case to the data base.
Second, with Mike here to help, we can go back over cases, follow-up with the intent of finding out the outcome, something the mainstream media also rarely does. I have begun working on a system to follow-up on these cases, to see if there was a conviction or lawsuit related to the case.
I would like to make another thing clear. We are still the source for news the online major media outlets do not carry. You will find some cases on Cruise Bruise, you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
The Cruise Bruise archive is still the largest, most organized, full-copy data base of incidents related to the cruise industry and their ports of call, though we may not be the quickest to post the case.
This past weekend, I reorganized the blog, another time intensive task, so you will notice the links to the left are much shorter than they had been. The reorganization happens every 2-3 months, as the links become too long to fit on the left side margin.
I actually like it better, because if you want to look for an article in September, the September link takes you to an alphabetical list of the stories that month, as well as giving you a section of links organized by date. I find it quicker and easier to zip around the blog.
As always, what is done on Cruise Bruise is all about you, the visitor, making it quicker and easier for you to research.
