Covering Hurricanes

By Meghan Martin

For the print edition of the Naples Daily News, Hurricane Wilma couldn't have picked a worse time of day to crash ashore.

For the paper's New Media department, its timing was impeccable.

By the time the hurricane made landfall about 15 miles southeast of Naples early Monday morning, that day's edition of the paper was already in the driveways of readers who hadn't been evacuated. It had already been roughly 15 hours since Monday's newspaper flew off the presses, and it would be at least another 12 until Tuesday's could be sent for production.

But for the Web site of a newspaper that strives to be the definitive source of news for its region, both in print and online (see our previous reports from Naples), Wilma's timing provided an unusual opportunity to overcome the time constraints imposed by print.

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Click here to see how other newspapers in Florida are covering Hurricane Wilma. Full list of reports from Naples All posts in Covering Hurricanes blog

Poynter Online multimedia editor Larry Larsen and I spent much of the weekend with the print and online staffs of the Naples Daily News, documenting their preparations for the storm. We left Naples for St. Petersburg Sunday afternoon, and now that we're home, we're in a position to approach the paper's Web site as readers.

I haven't spoken with anyone at the Daily News since our return -- they're immersed in covering the aftermath of Wilma as it unfolds. Eventually, we hope to do follow-up interviews with key staffers to get a better sense of how the paper's plans worked out.

But for now, after keeping up with NaplesNews.com's storm edition all day, here are my impressions -- from a reader's point of view:

• Beginning at 3 a.m. Monday morning, reporters stationed and embedded around the paper's coverage area began to compile a tick-tock timeline of what was happening in the final hours before the storm hit land. In short, one to two-sentence blurbs, reporters added information about power outages, public advisories and weather conditions around the area. I was struck by the usefulness of this addition, and disappointed that the final entry, when I checked on the page again Monday afternoon, had been made at 7:17 a.m.
  

• Videographers Jim Alred and Nick Hollensbe produced 12 video reports, documenting the preparations for Hurricane Wilma over the five days that led up to the storm. As of 5 p.m. Monday, though, there was no video showing Wilma in action.
  

• Images from before and after the storm were available in the form of photo galleries, compiled from pictures taken by both print and online photographers. Several hours after the bulk of Hurricane Wilma blasted through the newspaper's coverage area, this section remained focused on hurricane preparations that had happened in the days before.  An image of a shed blown into the middle of a rain-drenched street stretched across the top of the homepage for most of Monday. But the main visual signs that a hurricane had passed through the area that day came from users, who had submitted post-storm pictures on the paper's community journalism site (see below for more). By 4 p.m. Monday, the paper had posted its own first images of Wilma's aftermath.
  

• Five reporters from the paper's print and online departments blogged the storm from locations throughout the affected area: Lee County's Emergency Operations Center; Germain Arena, a hockey-rink-turned-evacuation-shelter; Marco Island, a barrier island south of Naples; and Alico Arena, site of the newsroom's relocation during the storm. These accounts, some first-person and some in the form of short news profiles, peppered the longer reports of the story that appeared on the Web site's "latest news" section with a personal, real-time angle. They were anecdotal and a well-crafted reminder that hurricane coverage is just as much about the people affected as it is about the storm. As one reader noted, the addition of time stamps to the reporters' entries -- some of which were updated multiple times a day -- could have given the blogs a greater sense of context -- and it looks as if the site had taken his advice by the end of the day with the addition of time stamps. [In the interest of full disclosure, one of the bloggers, Jessie Bonner, a reporter at the Bonita Daily News, spent six weeks with me in Poynter's Summer Program for Recent College Graduates this year.]
  

• The Web site continued to produce and upload its daily news podcasts, which, until Wilma threatened the area, had only been produced five days a week. By Monday evening, none of the podcasts reflected the damage that had been done by the storm, but the paper's online staff  typically produces the reports just as the next day's newspaper is sent to press. The Naples Daily News podcasts, which, about two months ago, covered only local high school sports, started reporting from the paper's news section this month. They are part of the paper's initiative to provide the news in as many formats as possible, so that readers (and users) can choose how they get their news. Above the headlines of each story on the paper's Web site are options to e-mail, print, discuss, or download the article to an iPod or a cell phone.
  

• Four of BonitaNews.com's Web cameras were still operational after the storm, and were highlighted on the "storm edition" of the site. A few, such as the Fifth Avenue South camera, show the same night shot at every click. Some provide only still shots of the area, while others provide both stills and video. But, largely because most of them are not working (perhaps because they have been knocked off by the hurricane), they don't offer a strong indication of the effects of Hurricane Wilma on the paper's coverage area.
  

• The site updated its events and entertainment calendar to include "A Look at Today's Cancelled Events" and featured upcoming events that remain on the schedule.
  

• The Web site also maintained its "We" section, the citizen-journalism initiative of BonitaNews.com. Earlier in the week, users had posted images of painted plywood and hurricane shutters after a request for submissions was posted on the site. As the storm passed through the region, it also became a place where residents began to submit photos of property damage and downed trees in their neighborhoods, which could be of particular use to evacuees as they attempt to assess the effects of the storm in their area.
  

• The site also pooled all of its coverage of Hurricane Wilma into one page, with photo galleries, "additional coverage" links and cross-promotion to the paper's print edition.
  

• I found one of the most useful parts of the site, as we prepared to visit Naples in a potential hurricane, to be the resources that could be found under "Other Important Info" on the right rail of the storm edition page. There, readers can find shelter and evacuation maps, an explanation of hurricane scale, an explanation of storm surge, the life cycle of a hurricane, and all of the paper's 2005 hurricane coverage.