Jeff Beckham

Congress Avenue through a great stretch of downtown Austin was closed this morning after dozens of birds were found dead in the streets. The area was reopened around noon after officials determined to public health threat existed.

Other than determining the cause of the deaths, the story has pretty much come and gone at this point, but I was underwhelmed by the local media’s coverage of it in the early part of the day. I think a great opportunity was missed by the Statesman and other media outlets to capitalize on first-hand reports of people in the downtown area and those affected by the massive street closures. The Statesman’s story package is a standard news story with a slideshow of seven photos and video from a press conference.

This was a great opportunity for the Statesman to get photos and reports from people near the area, or to send their own reporters out with digital cameras or camera phones to capture a sense of what the scene was like out there this morning.

Here are some photos that people uploaded to flickr from around downtown this morning.

I pick on the Statesman a bit here, but the same applies to all the media outlets in town. Fox 7’s offices were in the middle of the closed area, but their website has the story buried under the “Fox 7 News and Weather Update”.