Wrong, Wrong, Wrong And Just Badly Wrong

UPDATE – SCROLL DOWN FOR RESPONSE
Sad news is reaching the offices of This Is This early this morning from US paper the Rocky Mountain News. It has been following the story of the death of 3-year-old Marten Kudlis who was killed on Tuesday while having an ice cream with his mother when a car careened into the Baskin Robbins.

Tragic, right? Report the facts and leave it at that?

Not so, says the RMN, which blames Colorado’s lax immigration laws, because one of the cars was being driven by a – you guessed it – illegal alien. Yeah. From Guatemala.

OK. You said your piece. Happy?

No way, says the RMN, throwing in a little multiplatform reporting to give us live graveside coverage from the funeral of little Marten.

“Rocky reporter Berny Morson filed live updates from the memorial service of 3-year-old Marten Kudlis” screams the editorial. There’s a handy widget within the article or you can see the twitter updates here.

The reporting included insights such as:

• rabbi says marten loved to be tickled. calls the death a nightmare. no words can sooth us, he says.   05:28 PM September 10, 2008  from txt 
• family member says marten is with grandmother who died last year. ‘ marten we loved you,’ he says. People sobbing.   05:22 PM September 10, 2008  from txt
• video shows marten blowing out candles on birthday cake, marten with dog. last images are of headlines.   05:44 PM September 10, 2008  from txt 
• coffin lowered into ground   06:18 PM September 10, 2008  from txt   
• family members shovel earth into grave
  1 day ago from txt

Apparently there’s no YouTube montage announced yet, but rumour has it there’s an interactive quiz a facebook app doing the rounds.

UPDATE
Of course, they write back:

Mr. Jones, This funeral was of great community interest. You may not
understand all of the issues surrounding it, since I notice that you
don’t live in Colorado. We were invited to the funeral. We never cover
funerals where they have asked us not given us permission to attend. We
were not intrusive. And we didn’t write anything that wasn’t included in
the next morning’s newspaper. It was just a different, more immediate
medium. I disagree with you that it was in poor taste. Deb Goeken,
managing editor.