As firefighters and rescue workers in Orange County and throughout Southern California proved their mettle the past two weeks by battling out-of-control blazes and saving lives, accurate, up-to-date information about the fires has been absolutely vital.
And for the most part, the county's big local daily newspapers—and, more to the point, their websites—were up to the task.
Of her site's coverage, Latimes.com executive editor Meredith Artley says, “Necessity was the mother of invention.” Orange County Registereditor Ken Brusic says the disaster coverage was a literal “trial by fire” for the paper/website. Both editors turned their sites from news sources to community resources—which just might be the future of journalism.
Artley says Latimes.com staffers quickly realized they needed to adapt in order to get what they needed done. That meant getting nearly 60 reporters acquainted with filing live on the Web, making the site more friendly to mobile-phone Internet browsers in order to send alerts, creating a forum for people to locate displaced friends and family, and using reader-generated video, all for the first time.
“We had all hands on deck on the Web team,” she says. “We really just kind of threw everything at it.”
For the Register, Brusic says most of the changes to their website during the wildfires were already planned to be phased in over time, but circumstances dictated otherwise. With a deluge of new information coming in at almost every moment, Brusic says, the paper realized the community itself was one of its biggest assets when it came to breaking news.
“When you think about the magnitude of just Orange County's fire, we really do need the help of the community,” he says.
For OCRegister.com, that meant launching software that allowed people to create their own discussion forums and upload pictures and other content onto the site. The website became so inundated that new servers had to be added to handle the traffic.
Both Brusic and Artley say one of the most useful and popular tools on their sites was the one enabling users to share their photos with others.
Brusic says the Register's success underscores the new mission of mainstream news organizations' websites to be not just a source of authoritative information that even 24-hour news channels can't touch in terms of timeliness, but also a gathering place for the community.
Artley says that if news operations don't create a sense of community among readers, then they will lose out to other sites that do. It's not exactly journalism, she says, but it's something akin to it that should be fostered in an Web-centered media world.
“We should be convening these conversations, and if we don't, someone else is going to,” she says.
