If you navigated to that page this morning, the horrific accident is rightfully the top story. Not so rightfully, though, is the placement of an autoplay video, taken from a rooftop about a mile from the airport and apparently verified by authorities, of the 787 heading toward the ground just moments before it impacts and explodes. I find this practice obscene.
It is good that a video exists, in the sense that it will be an important part of investigators’ attempts to understand what happened here, and reduce risks in the future. It is not good to force people seeking news about this or any other topic today to watch people die. Apparently the video does not feature the actual crash and fireball; I am not positive of this, because, horrified, I scrolled quickly down once I understood what I was looking at. Even if true, it is an absurd editorial judgment to make.
It is fine to make this video available. Include a link to it, with an explanation of what people might expect. People are welcome to opt in to such an experience if they find it useful. I am aware that people do not have to visit the Times homepage, and also that there are likely ways to adjust browser settings to prevent all autoplay videos; most people will not do this, however. Many people, myself included, also harbor some degree of a fear of flying already; do not force a moving image of mass death on us, one that can then live, perhaps forever, in those already-afraid brains.
This is not the first time the New York Times has done this. The paper of record put autoplay videos at the top of the page for both the Potomac River crash of a plane and helicopter in January that killed 67 people, and for the late-December Jeju Air crash that killed 179 in South Korea. It is a frankly bizarre practice, likely borne of some misguided sense of steely-eyed “we must report the news” gravitas. It also seems to be a part of a frankly annoying insistence on homepage autoplay videos of all kinds, including the no-one-asked-for-this videos of reporters in freshly ironed shirts looking into the camera and explaining the story that a visitor can simply click on and read.
Plane crashes, obviously, are in another category completely. Stop making your readers watch them.
Update: A few hours later they seem to have turned off the autoplay. So they do know how.
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