How washingtonpost.com covered Katrina
Steve Fox, the liasion between the washingtonpost.com newsroom in Arlingon, Virginia and The Washington Post newsroom in downtown Washington, recounts how the Web site and newspaper covered Hurricane Katrina in this essay. Steve originally wrote this for the Online News Association's e-mail discussion list, talk@journalists.org. (If you're not an ONA member yet, you'll need to sign up first.)
During Katrina, I sat in on the planning meetings at the paper, acting as a communication conduit between the two operations. What became clear from the outset of this story was that everyone -- reporters, photographers, videographers, TV talking heads -- were involved in a technological and logistical nightmare. Both operations -- as well as many others out there -- rose above the many obstacles to provide some of the best online, written and television journalism in quite a while, imho.Washingtonpost.com's editors decided fairly quickly to send a team of videographers to the region and the technology they were carrying proved to be fairly reliable. The video team actually arriving in Mobile Monday afternoon just hours after Katrina had moved inland. The initial challenges were limited gas supplies and no lodging anywhere in the region. Our videographers -- John Poole and Ben Delacruz -- had to camp in their car for the first five days and they spent hours in gas lines in southern Alabama at the only open stations. However, by having spare gas cans and plenty of water, they were able to travel and move through the region as fluidly as damage would allow.
Tom Kennedy, our managing editor for multimedia, made sure the team was well-equipped technologically. Ben and John went down with laptops, video, and pano gear and two redundant transmitting systems -- a laptop with a Kyocera Aircard tied into the Verizon high speed wireless network, and a satellite phone system that could be powered by car battery if necessary. As it turned out, we initially relied heavily on the satellite system until enough power came back on line to make the cell towers function again.
The decision to send two people, while an expensive one, proved to be correct. In Virginia, Tom and others provided air traffic control for the team on the ground. While I fed Tom information about The Post's movements, story plans and locales, Tom was the primary point of contact for the videographers, letting them know about the movements of other Post people in the area, and giving them the overall picture of what was happening on the ground as reported by other news sources. This coordination prevented duplicate story lines and allowed both arms of the operation to inform the other of coverage plans -- with better journalism being the end result.
In a disaster of this magnitude, it was hard to get an initial sense of the totality of the damage. The mobility of our videographers was
limited initially by the reality of destruction that blocked roads, etc. They were cut off from a lot of communication by lack of power so it was essential to provide information from here about the big picture. Also, given the reality of looting, it was important to track their whereabouts and have regular checkins to fuel the flow of information and content in both directions. Tom provided that information from his perch and was able to communicate to the Web editors and to me what their daily filing plans were -- which I then shared with the editors at the newspaper. We maintained this communication loop on a nearly 24 hour basis and Tom was routinely fielding midnight phone calls to help lengthen our "coverage day".By having two people in the field together, we had better security, better ability to split roles (John filing/editing while Ben documented--ability to do video and panos simultaneously in the first few days). That made a critical difference to our coverage.
Later, when Travis Fox replaced John in the lineup in New Orleans, he and Ben were able to split up and pursue two different storylines aily.
Again, one could do panos while the other did video and this extended the tool set we used to tell the story.
While the solicitations for amateur photography were not hugely successful (in part because of the trauma of evacuation and the lack of power to move images), we were able to do several different things using panoramic and satellite photography to give looks at the devastation from a different perspective.
In particular, Tom mentioned the aerial panoramas we are now publishing on the site, one month or so after Katrina hit, that help convey powerfully the extent of the devastation still remaining to be cleaned up. This nicely augments the powerful human stories of suffering, dislocation, and loss that are being told through the video and photo galleries we've produced.
It's all here: washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/nation/special/10/index.html
Oct 13, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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