Graduation was Soggy but Safe

As early risers yesterday may have noticed, we reported overnight on what appeared to be a “tragic” Franklin High School graduation. It turns out it was anything but tragic, just damp.

Like many other people, we had hoped to watch the graduation via livestream. Then came the horrendous weather – and then there was no livestream in sight. What was accessible was a “chat box” on the web page from which the livestream broadcast was supposed to emanate. And the “chatter” in the chat box ranged widely from complaints and questions to several cryptic but credible-sounding statements to the effect that the graduation had been delayed by a death in the audience. Later comments named the deceased (who had a surname that is, in fact, found in Franklin) and went on to offer condolences to the family...

Our attempts to reach authoritative sources were not successful Friday evening, so we reported what we had read – with caveats about it all being unconfirmed.

Fortunately, around 8 am, a couple of trusted sources UNconfirmed the information we had posted. So, we quickly removed the story... And that had the unintended consequence of confusing the platform software so that several people told me they couldn’t access Observer at all for the rest of the day on Saturday. Sorry about that, too...

We try to balance timeliness with certainty. This was an occasion where our attempt at balance didn’t work.

Incidentally, the explanation of what did happened to the livestream can be found  courtesy of Franklin Matters and Franklin TV’s Pete Fasciano at https://www.franklinmatters.org/2023/06/franklintv-tells-story-behind-fhs.html

As for the folks sharing stories about folks dying, we don’t know what to say. Perhaps a new kind of humor is now in style, but that all seems pretty unfunny to us.