Digital First newsrooms covering Hurricane Sandy

Digital First Media newsrooms across the Northeast are covering Hurricane Sandy today (and have been covering the preparation and approach all weekend. The New Haven Register’s home page (screenshot above) shows how our news sites are giving this approaching disaster the huge-story coverage it merits.

Our national Thunderdome newsroom is providing coverage to all of our sites through a Hurricane Sandy News blog.

Coverage by Digital First newsrooms has included:

• A page with all storm content at the York Daily Record
• A Storm Center blog at the North Adams Transcript
• A map of local Sandy “hot spots” at the Norristown Times Herald
• Map of evacuation areas and emergency shelters (New Haven Register)
• List of emergency shelters (Chambersburg Public Opinion)
• Liveblogs on the approaching storm: Kingston Daily Freeman (screenshot below), York Daily Record, Delaware County Times and Trentonian)
• Stories about storm preparation (Times Herald, Pottstown Mercury, West Chester Daily Local News, Main Line Times, Middletown Press, Berkshire Eagle, Bennington Banner, Montgomery Media)
• Advice for handling power outages (Lowell Sun)
• Warnings from public officials (Troy Record and Charleston Daily Mail)
• Offering e-editions free or free access around a paywall, in anticipation of print delivery problems (Lansdale Reporter, Hanover Evening Sun)
• School (and other) closings (Saratogian, Lebanon Daily News and Torrington Register Citizen, North Adams Transcript)
• Invitations to send photos (Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise and several others)
• An embedded map of the hurricane’s projected path (Brattleboro Reformer and several others)

While Sandy was hitting the Atlantic coast, our newsrooms on the Great Lakes are also covering severe weather, reporting on local flooding and closings in Ohio, too.

Monitoring the news on multiple screens in the “Brady bureau.”

Even though our Thunderdome newsroom in Manhattan was in the evacuation zone, staff members continued cranking out national coverage. Thunderdome Editor Robyn Tomlin relocated to the “Brady Bureau,” Editor-in-Chief Jim Brady’s Tribeca apartment because her apartment also was in the evacuation zone. Robyn reported losing power Monday night but said DFM colleagues continued to cover the storm:

• Karen Workman curated photos of amazing waves up and down the Atlantic coast.
• Ryan Teague Beckwith explained how the hurricane could impact the election.
• Jason Fields explained the hurricane warning system that sends alerts to cell phones.
• How to prepare for the approaching storm.
• A history of Northeastern hurricanes.

I’m not going to have time to check all the Sandy-related social media engagement by Digital First newsrooms, but noticed this question by Ed Stannard of the New Haven Register, a smart crowdsourcing effort:

As usual, Jeff Edelstein of the Trentonian is also rocking with his Facebook engagement, asking questions and posting photos in a steady conversation with his 4,000-plus friends.

Also worth noting (with thanks to new Connecticut Managing Editor Ben Doody for the heads-up):

The @nhregister cafeteria being open during #ctsandy could be one of the enduring tales of the storm. Maybe worth a @stevebuttry blog post.

— Ben Doody (@bendoody) October 29, 2012

With the eye of the hurricane still offshore, we’re just getting started with covering this disaster, which will affect hundreds of Digital First journalists in more than two dozen newsrooms. I have updates with some highlights of our coverage and will continue to do so, though I won’t mark every update (and invite colleagues to call highlights to my attention, though obviously you have more pressing matters than helping me).

I’m not going to round up national coverage here (that could take all day), but this one caught my attention: Brian Stelter of the New York Times used Qik to provide live video from Rehoboth Beach this morning:

High tide in Rehoboth Beach = huge waves. Live video from my iPhone for next 10 min: qik.ly/KctUg #qik — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 29, 2012

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