News organizations have been experimenting with the power of visuals in their coverage of the floods, filling the homepages of their Web sites with large images, photo galleries, videos and live streams. Editors at
The (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Gazette,
The Des Moines Register and
WHO-TV say the visual aids have driven traffic to their sites and helped show users the magnitude of the flood throughout the state and in their own communities.
Monday morning, flood coverage took up the entire top portion of the
Gazette's and
Register's homepages. The visuals on the
Gazette's and the
Register's sites portray emotion -- a woman crying as she pleads with police to let her into her house during a security checkpoint, a man pointing his finger in frustration at not being able to enter his Cedar Rapids home.
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Last Friday afternoon the homepage was dominated by a single image of a flooded city with the headline "No Longer an Island." |
"We've found that people are still scrolling down to read our content, but we think the visual aspect of this story has a big impact," said Jason Kristufek, online operations editor at the
Gazette.
Web traffic has soared, Kristufek said, from 105,000 page views on a normal day to 1.5 million page views last Thursday. The number of unique visitors also increased, from 21,000 on a normal day to 111,000 Thursday. On Friday, traffic climbed to 1.6 million page views and 135,000 unique visitors.
Flexibility and communication have been key to getting news out fast on the
Gazette's Web site and to realizing that carefully mapped out plans might not come to fruition until later in the coverage process, if at all.
"Be prepared to constantly update and have more people on hand to update. I would think the kind of content you have and how you display it has to be a consideration beforehand, but you have to be flexible," Kristufek said. "[Thursday] morning we thought the water would be high, but we didn't know the whole area was going to lose power."
Quickly changing the layout of the homepage was relatively easy, Kristufek said, given that there are a variety of homepage templates available on the back-end of the site, all of which can be modified in-house.
Similar to the
Gazette, the
Register features links to photo galleries, videos and maps on its homepage. Editorial content lies below the images, with links to the latest news from the
Register's breaking news blog and the latest headlines, most of which center on the flood. Given the volume of users who are turning to news organization's Web sites for information about the flood, it makes sense that news sites would offer opportunities for people to submit their own content.
The Register is using a Google map to display user-generated content.
Users can search the map by address and upload their own photos and related text, which appear when clicking on various icons on the map. Depending on which boxes are selected, information will appear on the map broken into categories such as "water in basement/minor damage" and "major damage." The map also features links to the
Register's discussion forum about the floods.
A different map on the site displays information about evacuation spots in the Des Moines area,
while another shows the latest precipitation and flood stages across Iowa.
"We've been doing interactive maps like this for other, non-emergency situations, so it just struck us as an appropriate use for something we'd already developed," said James Wilkerson, data editor at the
Register. "Michael Corey [digital projects editor] hacked it together from existing code in about a day."
WHO-TV in Des Moines has found maps and other visual aids to be especially useful when covering natural disasters. WHO''s homepage prominently displays a "First Alert Severe Weather Bulletin," which lets users click on individual counties to learn more about the flood warnings in their communities. Stuart Rauh, director of Internet operations at WHO-TV, said the feature is generally not displayed on the homepage.
"I've had that as a standard feature for our Web site, basically the idea being that whenever we go into severe weather mode we can change the homepage to reflect that," Rauh said.
The background code of the bulletin pulls weather alert data from the National Weather Service's weather data feed, Rauh said, and then plugs various information into the map. The site's servers pull the information about every 10 minutes.
The top five stories rotating on WHO's homepage Monday morning were related to the flood and
flood resources. Throughout much of last week, from about 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. each day, WHO's homepage featured a live stream of the flooding, which included raw video feeds, live shots and news conferences held by local government officials. The live stream is not something the site generally runs on the homepage, unless there is a news event during the day that the station can't get to or stay at for an extended period of time.
KCCI-TV in Des Moines also has a live Web cam on its site, showing an overview of the flooding in the downtown area.
The information on the site was relatively stagnant Friday, Rauh said, in part because the weather has been calmer than in the past couple of days. "Right now we're really in a follow-the-emergency-officials press conferences mode," Rauh said Friday morning. "We're just waiting to see if the levees are going to hold."
The flooding has caused WHO-TV.com's traffic to go "off the charts," Rauh said. The first day the site featured the live streaming, the site received about 13,000 views, which is about one-third the amount of traffic the site gets in an entire month. "It's this kind of an event where we really get to shine," Rauh said. "On a day-to-day basis you're fighting with the rest of the crowd, but TV stations in this kind of an event -- this is what we're here for."
Having the live stream, the weather bulletin and other visuals to tell a story are important, Rauh said, so long as the presentation of them doesn't compromise the accuracy of the information and the speed with which it's posted online.
"My philosophy here for the Web site has always been to keep it basic. The user isn't going to care if they're getting the information via Flash or via video or via some other fancy technology; they're going to care that they get the info and they don't have to wait for it," Rauh said. "The important thing is having a mechanism that gets the information up there as fast as we can."
What other visual packages have you seen news organizations put together during their coverage of a natural disaster?
