Disaster Strikes Schroon Lake: A Baby’s Cries Saves Four?
Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 7:12AM A hotel collapse in Schroon Lake? Four people and a baby injured? 10,000 without power? That was the buzz on Twitter on Tuesday, as several Tweets gave graphic descriptions of the doom and gloom Schroon was dealing with after a “severe storm” ravaged our lakeside hamlet.
Except there was no hotel collapse or power outage or any injuries we know of that day (maybe a bad case of sun burn, perhaps)
Turns out the “Schroon Lake Disaster” was a lesson for graduate journalism students at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University. The students attended a faux news conference and using the power of the social media site Twitter, used 140 characters to get the news out.
“This was part of a class exercise for graduate students in our summer news reporting class,” teacher Jon Glass told us in a Tweet yesterday.