My Digital First Media colleagues at Heritage Media faced a huge breaking news challenge last week when a tornado ripped through Dexter, Mich.
The Heritage staff’s performance illustrates the range of breaking-news techniques that journalists use in covering disasters today. As Managing Editor Michelle Rogers explained in her blog post about the coverage:
As a group of weekly publications in print, it has been an ongoing challenge to get our audience to realize we’re now a daily online. I think the tragedy of the tornado served as a reminder to readers that they don’t have to wait until Thursday to get their local news, and we were happy to oblige, providing breaking news coverage, from news stories, Storify compilations, photo galleries and videos to Tweets and Facebook posts, and SMS texts to email alerts.
Online Coordinator David Veselenak elaborated in an email (lightly edited):
In terms of engagement, it doesn’t get much better than this past week. With the tornado in Dexter, it gave us an opportunity to truly harness the web and use non-traditional reporting, as well as crowdsourcing with our audience.
We started by receiving some user-footage of the tornado someone sent in, which garnered several hundred video views. We had some photos of the hail sent in as well. We were tweeting the updates as they came in when the tornado touched down as well. We also used some submitted footage of the tornado for our mini-documentary that was assembled earlier this week.
Reporter Krista Gjestland created a reaction Storify that night, pulling photos and reaction from Twitter, since many staffers could not access the village. Amy and I worked and pulled YouTube videos that people had shot and embedded them into a story post on our website, which had several hundred clicks. We also saw several new text message subscribers and new likes on the Chelsea/Dexter Facebook page.
We had several groups send us photos of them helping with relief, as well as community-submitted releases talking about ways to help out with the efforts.
We’ve also tried establishing a “virtual lost-and-found” on our Facebook page, encouraging people to post photos or descriptions of items they’ve found or lost in the tornado damage. We’ve had several people post on our wall already, and then we re-share it to our Facebook fans.
We sent out a pair of breaking news email alerts on the tornado as well. We’ve begun soliciting the new email newsletter system, too, trying to get people to sign up for the new alerts.
Dexter Editor Erica McClain live-tweeted the press conference with the sheriff, state and village officials as well, posting updates on the news. Several staff members, including Tanya, Amy and Michelle were updating social media and the website, while others were in the field reporting.
Be sure to read Michelle’s full account of the coverage. She’s right to be proud of her small staff’s coverage under difficult circumstances. This is an excellent example of a point I often make in discussing social media use by journalists: You have to use multiple tools. Check out the range of just the social media tools the Heritage staff used: YouTube (Erica quickly found and embedded the YouTube video above), Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Storify. And they used a full range of other digital tools: videos, photos, text alerts, the website, email.
Are you seeing any major damage? Be sure to tweet us any photos of the storm you have (but be sure you stay safe!)
— Heritage Newspapers (@HeritageNews) March 15, 2012
The tornado warning has been extended for another hour to 7:28.
— Heritage Newspapers (@HeritageNews) March 15, 2012
Congratulations to the hustling, Digital First staff of Heritage: Michelle Rogers, David Veselenak, Erica McClain, Sean Dalton, Ben Baird, Amy Bell, Krista Gjestland, Tanya Wildt and James Dickson.
Hey Steve – the hyperlink in your 2nd paragraph seems to be broken.
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Fixed it. Thanks, Chris!
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[…] Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills […]
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[…] Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills […]
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[…] Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills […]
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[…] Heritage Media’s tornado coverage […]
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Truly impressive.
Michael Conniff
The Isaacson School for New Media @ CMC
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[…] Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills […]
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[…] Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills […]
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[…] Michigan tornado coverage shows off Heritage journalists’ digital skills […]
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