Tom Mallory was
in Toronto giving a presentation at ONA about covering tragedy, then a few days later, he was flying back to San Diego over the eastern front of one of the major fires, watching tragedy strike.
Mallory got off the plane and headed for work at
The San Diego Union-Tribune, where he is Breaking News Team editor. He and his colleagues decided it was best for him to work the overnight shift to make sure the fire coverage stayed constant throughout the night, so he went home only to be evacuated.
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Tom Mallory
An aerial view of the smoke from the San Diego fires. |
Since then, Mallory's been doing what many reporters and editors have to do in the midst of tragedy: be the newsroom night owl, figuring out ways to provide continuous, breaking news coverage of Mother's Nature unpredictable course. Mallory's been working about 7 p.m. to 5 or 6 a.m., but he laughs at the idea that he's had a "hectic schedule."
"Pish posh. I live for this," he said. Juggling work with survival during a natural disaster has become a well-known challenge for many journalists, who face the need to constantly report on and update stories while making sure they, and their families and friends, are safe.
"I'd say your family should come first," Mallory said. "Take care of your home or your family or your pets or livestock or your valuables as you need to. Then go in and be able to go give work your all. There were plenty of people working around here who didn't know if their homes would be spared. There were others who had stayed away to do what they had to do, and no one thought less of them for that." During times of tragedy, journalists are reminded of the valuable service they can provide to those who are at risk.
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Tom Mallory, Breaking News Team editor, San Diego Union-Tribune |
To help inform people of the risks in their communities,
The Union-Tribune set up a
breaking news fireblog that received about 10 million page views from Monday to Friday morning. This is about one-third of the total traffic
The Union-Tribune's site gets in a month, Mallory said.
The fireblog includes links to community profiles
The Union-Tribune put together, listing evacuation updates and
community news about the fires. It also lists
fire facts that detail key characteristics of the five major fires in San Diego county.
An interactive fire map has generated more than one million page views on the site. Other news organizations,
such as the Los Angeles Times, have also been using
hyperlocal fire maps to create interactive ways of informing and engaging users. The site also has several photo galleries showing the
impact of the fire.
The Union-Tribune's Web site has been ripe with readers' comments, which Mallory has read to get a better sense of what audience members are looking for when they go to the site. "I've been amazed at how many commenters have been thanking us on the fireblog, expressing their appreciation for basic, current and straightforward information that they can trust."
But then there are those who aren't as happy with the coverage. One woman, Mallory said, complained about the paper's lack of information about the fires, calling the paper "tabloid scum."
So Mallory wrote an e-mail back to her, listing the coverage and resources the
Union-Tribune has provided, and then posted the top half of his response on the blog for readers' benefit. About 50 people responded to the
blog post, many of whom thanked the paper for its coverage. "The response was swift and amazing, huge gratitude for something that wasn't very newspapery," Mallory said.
Having dealt with a similar firestorm in 2003, the newsroom quickly switched into disaster-coverage mode, Mallory said. "What was different this time," he noted, "was that the newsroom was primed and ready to cover breaking news for the Web, and editors instinctively acted to extend our hours of coverage around the clock."
The Union-Tribune is working to expand its Breaking News Team to cover more of the clock. "Despite huge improvements, we could better coordinate breaking news and print reporting to avoid duplication of efforts," Mallory said. "It's also become clear that we need to do more training for staffers in covering disasters, breaking the news online and even in giving dictation, which is often the most efficient way of getting information from one place to the other."
Ongoing Improvements
When figuring out how to improve coverage, news organizations sometimes have to break the mold.
The Union-Tribune, for instance, decided to focus its sole attention on the fires rather than worrying about covering other local news.
"We live in a highly formatted world. The key to this kind of coverage is knowing when to break out of the format," said Chris Jennewein, Union-Tribune vice president, Internet operations. "We were out of the format by 4 or 5 p.m. in the sense that the fire story dominated our homepage. And we were fully that way by Monday morning."
"We've focused almost entirely on the fire," Jennewein said. "I think that when there's a major local story like this, everything goes out the window. Being the best source on this is our mission."
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Chris Jennewein, Union-Tribune vice president, Internet operations |
Meeting that mission has been difficult because of all the traffic on the site. They couldn't run ads on the site for a while because of all the traffic and when traffic to the site's Newsblog overloaded the servers, reporters and editors had to switch to another blogging tool that they hadn't been trained to use.
Jennewein said two servers were added on Monday and five servers were added on Tuesday to ease the online traffic jam. On a typical Sunday, The Union-Tribune's Web site gets about 800,000 page views. Last Sunday, it jumped to 1.5 million. On the site's busiest day, Monday, it might get around 1.2 million page views. Last Monday, there were 6.7 million page views. That number rose to 9.8 million on Tuesday.
"We need to be better prepared to get hit by a huge surge in traffic," Mallory said. "We also need to have better tools to gather and effectively present user-generated stuff."
"We'll be working hard to map out everything and build databases that we can use to track the months and years of rebuilding in the devastated neighborhoods," Mallory said. "And we'll be covering that reconstruction both as chroniclers and watchdogs."
In looking for a structure to follow amidst the chaos of the fires, the
Union-Tribune turned to its
disaster plan, which details likely assignments and additional tips for editors. Updated disaster plans can be crucial for newsrooms when natural disasters strike.
"I think we should make disaster coverage and the tenets of the plan a subject of mandatory training sessions for the appropriate editors and reporters," Mallory said. "But a story like this has a life force of its own, and any such plan can't be overly rigid or constraining."
Especially when so much is at stake. Jennewein said about 50 percent of his staff members who work on the Web site have had to evacuate their homes over the past week.
Tragedies and Their Aftermath
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Mark Schleifstein cleaning out his house after Hurricane Katrina. |
Mark Schleifstein can relate to journalists in California. Schleifstein, an environmental reporter at
The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, reported on, and lived through, Hurricane Katrina.
Schleifstein's house, his car -- nearly everything -- was destroyed. From Aug. 29, 2005 to the end of January 2006, he crashed in nine different places -- at a dorm room at Louisiana State University with 10 other people, at an older gentleman’s house and on a journalism professor's couch.
“A big difference between what's happened here and what's happening in California is that in California you can go a couple miles away and there are nice neighborhoods that aren't burning," Schleifstein said. "That was definitely not the case in South Louisiana. You had to go all the way to Houma or Baton Rouge."
In the midst of tragedy, Schliefstein said, news organizations would do well to acknowledge the mental health needs of their staff members. "It's really up to the reporters to force their management to start participating immediately in any sort of mental health programs that are helping people get through this difficult process," Schliefstein noted in a phone interview. "Even the best organizations can be slow in responding, and sometimes you have to put your foot to the pedal."
As of Friday morning, Mallory was still working almost 12-hour days and had stayed in a hotel because he was too tired to make the 30-mile drive home. He's beginning to lose all sense of time. Friday morning, he said he insisted 7:30 a.m. was 7:30 p.m. For now, the flames are still burning.
Bob, You make a good point here in recognizing the...
