Hurricane community network
Since Hurricane Charley struck, the Web site of the Fort Myers, Fla., News-Press has been using its discussion forums -- rebranded "Info Exchanges" -- to help readers share information about friends and family and even help people find out if their homes are still standing.
By choosing to display the e-mail addresses of readers in the forums, the site "empowered [readers] to communicate directly with one another. A social network was being born, just when, and just under the precise circumstances, it was needed," Mackenzie Warren, the News-Press Multimedia Editor, told Poynter Online.
Warren also said, "Readers proved to be both trustworthy and accurate in their statements, he wrote.
"None of this would have been possible if our technical team didn't respond the way they did -- that was part of the quick evolution," Warren said. "People who aren't journalists and have lots of other responsibilities acted fast when asked to stretch existing tools we had to do jobs they weren't meant to. For example, we didn't have the ability to intervene in one of our forums and answer questions posed in individual posts, but our operations manager Christy Sobolewski re-wrote the software in an hour to enable that to happen. That opened the door to the public service information clearinghouse, the chat and the blog."
Aug 23, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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