Any reason ABT hasn't covered MH370 plane crash/disappearance?

Any reason ABT hasn't covered MH370 plane crash/disappearance?

It's well covered by the major news outlets and it's unrelated to Australian business travellers, at least at the moment.  Also, there is currently very little news to report on the issue.

I agree with DM1, but still a tragic event. 

180mis: I'm sure some others may be thinking the same, so it's good that you've asked this so we can share the thinking from our side.

Choosing which stories we write is actually a fairly complex process, or at least the 'formula' behind each choice is.

A key factor is the stories we choose not to write, and aviation/safety (for various reasons) generally falls into that basket.

Another is how much a story is being covered by other media, especially the mainstream/news media, and what value we could add compared to them.

In this case, MH370 is everywhere, with every angle covered and then some. Compared to The Sydney Morning Herald for example, or specialist aviation blogs like Plane Talking,  there's nothing that AusBT could write which would come anywhere near close to what's already being done so well by those and other news outlets.

So for us to cover MH370 would add no value for our readers. In fact it would detract our focus from other stories which are more 'core' for AusBT and not covered by the news media.

And finally, a developing story like this requires constant focus – it's not suitable for just one story, a piece of 'done and move on' publishing. This story keeps going and going, with new twists seeming to arise every few hours at this stage.

I believe that if AusBT covered MH370 at the outset then there would be a reasonable expectation from readers that we would continue to cover it... and looking at all the developments in the first 12 hours, then the next 12 hours, then over the past two days and the fact that this is still an ongoing story, means we'd be stretched just on MH370 and letting our 'core' content, the stories that are unique to AusBT, slip.

So it becomes a choice between running the same MH370 articles as everyone else except nowhere near as deep or detailed (in which case, where is the unique value of AusBT, what do we bring to the table?) or allowing that all the news on MH370 is already out there and focussing on the regular AusBT stories which we do but those other outlets do not do at all.

I must admit, as a journalist/editor/publisher it definitely crossed my mind to consider how a 'live blog' format could be utilised to handle a developing story like this, but MH370 is not 'core' to AusBT and we'd have nowhere near the resources to do that job properly.

Thank you David and well-said.  I would never have thought to come to this site for coverage.