A few months ago I posted a thread which was taken down because my credentials were in doubt. At the time I was looking for pilots willing to talk to a reporter.

Our reporting on transportation is finally complete and now published.

It looks as though the Washington Post will run about four stories. Here's the link to the fatigue story which also ran in the business section of Monday's print edition. The Post also ran a story on the front of Sunday's section, and one Tuesday.

MSNBC also ran a version of the fatigue story on its site. You can find it here.

The long version of the stories and all of our reporting is on the News21 site which went live Monday.

Thanks,
Charlie

 

Not bad articles, we always approve of fact driven reporting.

The problem is that the MSM has betrayed the trust of the people for so long that credibility is now at an all time low. Half truths, opinion based on bias, and just plain sloppy lopsided reporting have driven many former customers away. The people want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They are not getting it through the traditional channels and as a result, those traditional channels are dropping like flies.

Credentials are not a bit of paper or employment, they are founded on respect and credibility. Respect must be earned over the long term and trust is only preserved when credibility is always present.


Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High




All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
H. L. Mencken
US editor (1880 - 1956)

 

Nice start in the activity of investigative journalism; nice visuals, nice web design, good research, clear writing, nice theme integration, and good choice of subject. The theme of fatigue is obviously current these days. But if you want this website to do anything other than be an academic exercise, then you need to narrow down your focus into one mode of transportation, doesn't matter which, throw out the "we are going to rock the world" idea and go much deeper into one particular area in the subject. Choose airlines, rail, boats, taxicabs, bicycles or what have you, but choose one of them and concentrate all your efforts there. To lump them all together and attempt to address the subject of operator fatigue across all of them all is much too broad.

Within a category like river boats, you need to introduce something new besides what is already out there in the news, published reports, and internet about river boats and draw a picture of the situation that is new and no one has thought of before.

Actually, I kept hoping when I read these articles the writer would attempt to make a cultural sort of an argument along the lines that in the U.S. we work too hard for safety, and all the crashes we have in this area are actually due to a cultural defect in our society. Then you could have supported your thesis using cross-cultural references to other societies, list studies and show in a new way that the real problem is not regulation or industry but that we work too hard as a society, or something like that.

That would have been an interesting article. These articles only tell me that you did a couple of months of research on a huge subject with no real experience to bring to bear. You gathered a ton of facts in connection with your theme of operator fatigue, wrote something on it which doesn't really say anything new, and put it all together on a glitzy website. That level of information is available from NTSB reports and CNN news reports and you don't even need to be an expert. It is nothing I could not find by spending a couple of weeks reading internet reports and Wikipedia articles.

You have my sympathy that it is impossible to take a full load of classes and simultaneously be an industry insider with lots of experience in an industry or subject. But to bring attention on a given subject, you will need to bring something unusual to the table as an author. Everyone is equipped with things to think about all day every day in their own lives, and the news only adds a thousand more, so why should we think about this subject now? Everyone has some message they want to push by rearranging a set of facts to support it so your particular fact-set has to merit special attention in order for the reader to deem it worthy of their time and attention.

Some ideas you may wish to explore are finding a new whistleblower to join your source list, gathering or instigating a new set of fatigue studies, or you could go after a group and show how that particular group has been good or bad. Lots of things you could do but there has to be something new.

One thing you could also do is host a forum for the recognized experts in the field to come and argue about the subject and simply let them be your presentation without putting your twist on it. Nothing wrong with that. Round tables are a proven method to generate new material and while it does not show anything particularly new most of the time, the business of drawing focus on a particular subject serves to steer public opinion toward a solution and at the very least it elucidates existing knowledge and opinion on a subject.

Good luck and thanks for sharing.