Lessons from Katrina Help Media, Volunteer Efforts in Gustav Coverage

Via Mediashift

by Mark Glaser, 11:43AM

Map of evacuation centers and routes

When Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, the evacuation of the area went much more smoothly than during Hurricane Katrina three years ago. This time, the local, state and national agencies were more prepared for a potential disaster.

Similarly, online media outlets and volunteer efforts were also better prepared for this hurricane, having learned their lessons from the Katrina disaster, when they were scrambling to deal with the chaotic scene of widespread destruction and mass evacuation.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s NOLA.com website, for example, spent the past three years optimizing its site for breaking news coverage, adding blogs, increasing opportunities for citizen contributions and arming staffers with videocameras. And NPR social media strategist (and fellow PBS blogger) Andy Carvin was able to quickly mobilize volunteers online to create the Gustav Information Center hub and wiki thanks to his experience covering Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami and 9/11 — not to mention the wiki templates from these earlier projects.

In both cases, previous experiences helped inform a more mature response to the oncoming storm.

How Things Have Changed

In 2005, NOLA.com editor in chief Jon Donley told me in an OJR story that his staff had to radically redesign the site to effectively cover Katrina, as New Orleans became a one-story town, and the site was inundated with 30 million page views in one day.

“Our website got a complete redesign [on the fly],” Donley said. “By the time we evacuated we (had) a completely different design.”

Jon Donley

Ultimately, NOLA.com forums and blogs actually helped rescue teams find stranded people in homes, and the site helped the newspaper win a Pulitzer Prize for its Katrina coverage. Today, not just the site’s features and design, but also its editorial processes, reflect lessons learned during Katrina.

In a recent interview, Donley told me that the paper’s reporters all file stories online first; editors then decide which stories to pull and put into the print newspaper each day. This makes it much easier for print reporters to consider the web as their primary publishing platform during breaking news coverage, such as Gustav, when the newspaper couldn’t be printed because of power outages. Plus, NOLA.com staffers all carry videocameras with them around town in case they see breaking news. So it was easy for them to file video reports of damage and rescue operations as they traveled around New Orleans after Gustav hit.

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Hurricane In Louisiana? This Time, FEMA Is Prepared. This Time, FEMA Has MySpace Widgets.

Via Tech Crunch

by Michael Arrington on September 1, 2008

FEMA isn’t screwing around this time. There’s a hurricane hitting the gulf coast, and they are not going to take the blame if things go wrong.

They’ve evacuated 2 million people, for example.

And now, they’ve got widgets, which have been created by the Department of Homeland Security. Earlier this evening, MySpace says, Homeland Security phoned MySpace’s Chief Security Officer, Hemanshu Nigam who then called President (and hacker extraordinaire) Tom Anderson to quickly fast-track the project. Within a couple of hours Tom had posted a message to all MySpace users with links to information contained in the widget.

I’ve installed the FEMA widget on my MySpace page (sidebar, on the left, please excuse the music but it’s how I roll). It helps people locate victimes by directing them to FEMA’s National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System, allows people to make donations, and tracks the approach of Hurricane Hanna. It will be available in both English and Spanish.

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