At least 10 Times staffers, including top editor David Boardman, tweeted updates about the manhunt, funneling anxious, info-hungry readers to seattletimes.com. By now, all walls between old and new media—and infighting over which camp truly owned the news—had fallen. The web team set up a Google Wave account, on which it posted links to police scanner audio and communicated in real time with as many as 500 users, many feeding the Times tips about the manhunt. The newspaper’s web traffic soared to 3.3 million page views, the most single-day hits in the site’s history.
On Tuesday morning, around 2am, more than 40 hours after the coffee shop massacre, a cop on patrol in South Seattle pulled up behind a silver Acura Integra. Its hood was up, and when the officer ran the license plate, the car came up stolen. He was sitting in his police cruiser filling out paperwork on the stolen vehicle when he saw a hooded man approach in his rearview mirror. He jumped out of the car and immediately recognized Maurice Clemmons. That mole on his cheek. The officer commanded Clemmons to stop and drew his weapon. Clemmons walked around the front of the car, toward the officer. Put your hands up. Clemmons reached for his waist. The cop fired. At least two bullets hit Clemmons. He ran a few yards and collapsed.
Medics pronounced him dead on the scene. One of the slain Lakewood officers’ guns was in his pocket.
Sara Jean Green’s cellphone woke her from a deep sleep. It was Monday, April 12—more than five months after the Lakewood police killings. Green had been working a week of night shifts and had stayed up until 4am. Sara-a-a-a, the voice said. It was Green’s friend and fellow reporter Christine Clarridge. There was a hitch in her voice, an undeniable twist of emotion. Sara thought, Shit, What’s wrong? We won. Won what? We won the Pulitzer. We won a Pulitzer for Lakewood.
In the days after Clemmons was killed, the paper had stayed on the story, with detailed reports of the week in May 2009 when he pummeled neighbors with rocks, his fight with the deputies, his psychotic disconnect, and his claim that he was sent to kill in the name of God. And reporters kept digging, uncovering the system failures—in both Arkansas and Washington—that let him out on the streets. They also focused, in elegiac prose, on the victims—officers Tina Griswold, Ronald Owen, Mark Renninger, and Gregory Richards.
For the Sunday edition, a week after the shootings, the staff crafted its opus, “A Path to Murder: The Story of Maurice Clemmons.” The 3,783-word narrative arched back a generation and followed the killer from the cotton fields of Arkansas to the South Seattle street where he met his end. The byline included 22 names.
The entry the paper sent to the Pulitzer committee for consideration also included screen shots of its online coverage, the Google Wave feed, and tweets, including those of intern Cliff DesPeaux.
There would be no champagne uncorked the morning the award was announced. There were cheers and hugs—then tears. Four innocent people had been killed. The Times just told the story.
Published: July 2010
Thanks for the feedback Richard. Glad you like the article. Yes, per the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations report, released on March 31, 2010, The Seattle Times did have 132 fewer weekday readers (not a few hundred) than The Oregonian. But in the same survey The Seattle Times’s Sunday edition outpaced The Oregonian’s by more than 41,000 readers.
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/ecirc/newstitlesearchus.asp
An excellent article, but it seems to make a minor error: “the Northwest’s largest daily newspaper, which had recently undergone severe budget cuts and almost folded.”
The latest audit bureau circulation numbers show that the Oregonian still has a larger circulation than the Times (albeit by a mere few hundred readers). The influx of the P-I subscribers is the reason that the Times is even close; traditionally the Oregonian numbers dwarfed the Times. We in Seattle have tended to assume that Seattle is bigger and badder than Portland in every way, but their newspaper has had a much bigger presence in their community over the last decade or two than the Seattle Times in ours.
The last lines say it all. Not really in the mood to celebrate. What a horrific time that was. First Off. Brenton and then four more killed. FOUR. Then shortly after Deputy Mundell was also killed. Six Police ambushed and killed in less than 2 or 3 months. We as a community aren’t recovered yet from it and I welcome new laws/rules that come from these awful crimes. I also relish that the animal’s friends and family that helped him are being send to jail. Throw away the key.
One thing I will correct: Huckabee’s shot at election wasn’t damaged…. it was destroyed. Blown to bits. And I like the guy AND am a Conservative. He MAYBE could have survived this but his attitude after the murders buried him. He said:
“What I fear is the hubbub of this case will make it so that not only in Arkansas, but in states across this country, these files won’t even get looked at,” Huckabee said at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
http://www.mynorthwest.com/?sid=256692&nid=11
I took GREAT offense to that. Our cries of why the hell that animal was here etc were not hubbub.Gripping and well-told story. This event took place in my South Seattle neighborhood, but I followed the events on the tiny screen of a netbook while I was living in Paris. The Times excellent coverage made everything feel so immediate that I felt almost as if I was here, in the ‘hood, detouring around police road blocks and keeping an eye out for the perpetrator. Here’s to a new generation of outstanding coverage!