Only one click away

While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.

Quite a few comments on the New York Times website were from Minnesotans. "It has been surreal to view images of a place one block away from where I live," wrote one. "My house is about seven blocks from the bridge that collapsed," reported another. "The bridge literally collapsed about two blocks from my apartment. I had gone over the bridge just an hour before it collapsed," wrote a third. Several people posted links to resources on startribune.com.

I drove across that bridge just about every work day for nearly 14 years. There were questions raised about its structural integrity in the early 1990s. I can remember an inspection-and-repair unit that hung off the side of the bridge for months. The bridge is just downstream from a dam that kicks up mist (creating a chronic ice problem in the winter), and like all reinforced concrete structures in Minnesota, it's had problems with road salt that seeps into the concrete and attacks the rebar.