Carson City, Nevada, was in the headlines recently for a major wildfire that came perilously close to populous parts of the city and burned many houses. As in any newsroom under similar circumstances with a really big breaking story, editors at the
Nevada Appeal were getting reports in from writers throughout the day and night, and new information from police and fire scanners. How to handle getting that information out to citizens quickly? By producing a wildfire blog, of course. Internet editor
Kirk Caraway says it wasn't planned that way, but "we had all this information coming in, important information that the residents of this city needed to know right then. We couldn't wait to write stories." The result was the
Waterfall Fire Reporters' Journal, a blog for minute-by-minute wildfire reports.
Caraway explains that features editor
Kelli Du Fresne served as the blog "traffic copy" for all the reports and photos coming in, and monitored scanners and television news. She assembled information into quick reports -- typically a sentence or two -- then forwarded them to Caraway to publish on the blog. At the height of the story, the blog was being updated about every five minutes. Caraway says the paper received dozens of letters after the first thanking the staff for the blog and noting that the up-to-the-minute coverage was better than that on TV. "This was the best way to get information out to the public, and they loved it," he says. The
Appeal is a 17,000-circulation daily paper covering Nevada's capital city. (
Editor & Publisher has a
story on the
Appeal blog.)
