One of the great and humbling things about journalism in the digital age is being able to see at any given moment exactly how many people your journalism is reaching. Humbling because sometimes an important piece of reporting fails to reach the audience you think it deserves, sending you back to the drawing board. Great because other times, a story that you care deeply about touches more people in more places than you ever dreamed possible.
That's what happened to "The Search for Jackie Wallace."
In case you missed it - and it was hard to miss - "Search" told the story of a New Orleans hometown football hero who played in two Super Bowls before his addiction to alcohol and drugs left him homeless and living under an Interstate 10 overpass.
That's where recently retired NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune photojournalist Ted Jackson first stumbled across Jackie Wallace, sleeping on a cardboard box with a Times-Picayune Sports section by his side in 1990.
Ted's beautifully written and photographed account of their 28-year journey - at turns captivating, inspiring and, ultimately, heartbreaking - was the subject of an eight-page special section in The Times-Picayune.
The day before, it went viral. Moments after the story was posted on NOLA.com, Ted tweeted a link to his meager Twitter following of 600 or so people. That tweet has been retweeted 131,000 times, liked 279,000 times and has generated 4,600 comments. And Ted's little Twitter following has grown more than tenfold, to 7,839 followers.
Countless journalists from across the spectrum shared the story, including NPR's Scott Simon, Fox News' Brit Hume and Mike Allen of Politico and Axios fame. So did actor Don Cheadle and author Walter Isaacson. The Daily Mail of London wrote a story about it. Sports Illustrated interviewed Ted on its weekly "SINow" podcast, which host Richard Deitsch promoted with my favorite tweet in a very long time: "BREAKING: Journalism not dead."
The story continues to find new readers on NOLA.com, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and a host of other sites. It has reached 1.47 million unique visitors so far and generated more than 8.3 million page views (a larger number due to the story's expansive length). If it is not already the most-read single story in the history of NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, it will be eventually.
And the best part is, it deserves to be. I will point to it every time a hater repeats one of the popular lies about digital journalism: that it lacks depth, that it lacks seriousness, that it's tailored to short attention spans, smart-phone screens and shallow minds, that it's "nothing but clickbait."
The Internet embraces great reporting and good, long reads. It was true of "Justice for Danny," Jed Lipinski's gripping tale about a St. Bernard pharmacist who made peace with his son's drug-related death by taking down a notorious pill-mill doctor in the 9th Ward. It was true of "The Last Murder: A Katrina Cold Case," in which Jonathan Bullington and Michael DeMocker recount the fatal shooting of Tracy Bridges on August 27, 2005, which became a forgotten homicide in the wake of the storm. It was true of "Closing Costs," Katherine Sayre's award-winning cautionary tale about the impact of an expanding chemical plant in tiny Mossville, La. It is true of the life-or-death drama at the heart of our upcoming coastal project with The New York Times, which will be published in the coming weeks.
And it was especially true of "The Search for Jackie Wallace," which proved again that contrary to the naysayers, the Internet isn't destroying local journalism. It's taking it to a whole other level.
Mark Lorando is the editor of NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune and vice president of content of NOLA Media Group. Subscribe to "Sunday Thoughts," a weekly personal note from the newsroom, at subscription.nola.com/newsletters/.
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