Monday, October 22, 2007

SignOn Radio SignOn Radio is offering live audio coverage, including call-ins of the San Diego wildfires and mass evacuations.

Raging wildfires whipped by fierce winds are steadily encroaching on San Diego, forcing massive evacuations around the metro area.

The San Diego Union-Tribune's site SignOn San Diego offers a streaming Internet radio station, SignOn Radio. Today they've been supplying steady coverage of the fires, including phoned-in live reports from area residents and people following the story from other regions. News staff are manning the radio, taking calls. It seems like they're doing a pretty good job of applying journalistic judgement to both official information and call-ins.

For instance, a woman just called in from South Carolina. Her son is currently an inmate at a correctional facility in San Diego, located near an evacuation zone. She reported that she didn't think the facility had been evacuated. One of SignOn Radio's reporters called the facility and spoke to an official on-site, and confirmed that it had not been evacuated and was considered safe for now.

This is a pretty good service. In fact, it seems to me like a bit of an audio version of what NOLA.com was doing during and after Hurricane Katrina. One thing I particularly like is that it's available via iTunes, which makes it very simple for millions of non-tech-savvy people to access. (It's also being streamed via realPlayer and Windows Media Player, but iTunes is generally more user-friendly.

One suggestion: A lot of interesting information is coming through this streaming audio format, and it's clearly contributing to the reporting effort. I'd suggest that they could designate someone to take notes in an ongoing live format, such as liveblogging it, so people could follow the audio action in text format for quick scanning -- and maybe present it in a way that enables easy inbound linking to particular exchanges and allowing comments.

Liveblogging the audio action would expand the availability to people without broadband access -- like people who are in the process of evacuating. A feed of that text content could be syndicated to mobile devices. In the bigger picture, capturing this information in at least a text outline would preserve it for easier inclusion in the Union Tribune's reporting as well as making it discoverable via the site's search engine.

What do you think of SignOn Radio during this crisis? Please comment below.

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