What if…
A late night fire broke out in a nightclub in your town, killing nearly 100 people, and injuring scores of others?
A rain-soaked roof collapsed on shoppers in a mall?
A commercial jetliner crashed in a field outside your community?
A suicide bomber struck at a popular restaurant?
Sadly, as news organizations in Rhode Island, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the Middle East know, these are not hypothetical scenarios.
But what if any one of them happened in your community? If a big story is also a local one, are you ready?
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says American families need a disaster plan.
Newsrooms need one too, if they are going to rise to the challenge that disasters pose.
Public health and safety agencies routinely practice for the worst, knowing that “mock disaster” drills can help them identify holes in their training and planning. I’ve never known of a newsroom staging one.
But perhaps this is the time — before disaster plunges you into the nonstop frenzy of newsgathering — to get together with your newsroom colleagues to consider the best ways to respond to a disaster scenario.
Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s valuable advice available from news organizations with solid experience covering disasters. The New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described the way they covered local disasters in their newsroom newsletters.
Another resource is Best Newspaper Writing, which every year publishes winning entries in the Jesse Laventhol Award for Team Deadline Reporting given by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The entries are published with tips from reporters and editors involved in the stories. The lessons these newsrooms learned from their firsthand experience with disaster coverage suggests areas to contemplate in any disaster planning conversation.
Flood the Zone
On July 17, 1996, when a jetliner bound for Paris exploded and crashed over the Atlantic Ocean, most staffers at Newsday, the Long Island, N.Y., daily, had already left the office.
But within 90 minutes, Newsday reporters were aboard boats racing to the crash site, while other colleagues staked out makeshift morgues, an emergency command center and local airports.
Critical to that fast response, which earned Newsday the 1997 Laventhol Award and the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, was a culture primed to swarm a breaking story with reporting, research and editing resources.
“When there is breaking news, we have tended to have a culture where we just go all out,” assistant managing editor Miriam Pawel told me for Best Newspaper Writing 1997. “We have a lot of reporters trained to think that way.”
Two years earlier, in December 1994, a similar team effort by the staff of the now-defunct New York Newsday paid off when a firebomb exploded on a subway train a few days before Christmas, injuring dozens of passengers.
If disaster happens in your backyard, how ready is your staff to flood the zone?With reporters racing to the scene, “We start to involve all the editors on the desk in the effort,” Deborah Henley, the paper’s metropolitan editor, recalled in Best Newspaper Writing 1995. “We start to brainstorm afer that initial 30 minutes of getting everybody immediately on the street. What are the components of this story? What are the logical questions that readers are going to have, and let’s start thinking ahead to reporting out those lines.”
If disaster happens in your backyard, how ready is your staff — reporters, vsual journalists, editors — to flood the zone?
Librarians To The Rescue
Laventhol Award winners routinely credit news librarians and researchers with providing information that enables them to track down critical sources and key facts on breaking disaster stories.
Using Autotrak, a commercial database, John Martin, news researcher for the St. Petersburg Times, took a reporter’s tip and located a home address for the hotel employee who killed five co-workers on New Year’s Eve 1999. The result: an exclusive interview with relatives of the suspected shooter.
“It affirmed for me the value of being intertwined with the reporting process,” Martin says in Best Newspaper Writing 2000. “Sometimes researchers function just like journalists, having to pound, not the pavement but at least the phone lines, to get information.”
If disaster strikes close to home, will librarians be a fully-integrated part of the reporting process?
Narrative Strategies
A critical part of any disaster coverage planning is considering this question: What are the most effective ways to tell this story?
By now, editors and reporters should realize that by the time the reader picks up the morning paper, he or she has probably already heard the top stories of the day, from the radio, television or an online news source.
When that happens, some news organizations consciously decide to take a different approach.
That was the route The Miami Herald chose in 1995 when a deranged man hijacked a school bus carrying disabled schoolchildren.
What are the most effective ways to tell this story?“We had a problem here that newspapers have more and more these days,” said Herald senior writer Martin Merzer when I interviewed him for Best Newspaper Writing 1996. Merzer wrote the paper’s award-winning story drawing on reports from more than a dozen of his colleagues. “This thing happened at 8:30, 9 o’clock in the morning. We couldn’t get it in the paper for another 24 hours. All the local TV stations were already on it full-time. … Local news was on it, it was on CNN live, and we still had 24 hours to go.”
Merzer and his editors agreed there was no sense in writing a hard news lead — Police shot and killed a man who hijacked a bus and held 13 disabled children hostage Tuesday morning after a tense low-speed chase through rush hour traffic.
Their reasoning: “No one’s going to read into the third paragraph because they figure they know that.” The Herald’s only hope, Merzer said, was “to try to tell it better, in more detail, so that people who think they know a lot about this story figure out real soon that there’s more to know, and we’re going to tell it to them. I figured our best contribution would be to tell the story in a different fashion with compelling detail.”
Rather than summing up what readers already knew, Merzer gambled on writing a vivid, edgy reconstruction. The gamble paid off. The Herald’s story, which won the $10,000 Jesse Laventhol Award for Deadline Reporting, began in this irresistible fashion:
A waiter fond of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson attends morning prayers at his church, steps across the street and hijacks a school bus. Owing $15,639.39 in back taxes, wielding what he says is a bomb, Catalino Sang shields himself with disabled children.
Follow my orders, he says, or I will kill the kids. “No problem, I will,” says driver Alicia Chapman, crafty and calm. “But please don’t hurt the children.”
The saga of Dade County school bus No. CX-17, bound for Blue Lakes Elementary, begins.
If disaster hits your community, are you ready to decide — and defend — the way you tell the story?
Reporting for Story (Follow the “Gene Miller Rule”)
Related to narrative strategies is the need to collect the kind of information that can be used to write a compelling, accurate story rather than a recitation of facts.
Key to the Herald’s success on the bus hijacking story was the “Gene Miller Rule,” named after the paper’s legendary editor, two-time Pulitzer winning editor and writing coach:
“Get as much detail as you can possibly get into your notebook. You may not want it, but get it in your notebook. And don’t just tell them it’s ice cream; tell them what flavor of ice cream.”
Are reporters on your staff trained to collect the overabundance of information necessary to tell a detailed story?
Approaching Victims
How do you approach victims?
This is often the worst part of disaster coverage and one that reporters are often ill-prepared to handle.
Has your news organization considered and discussed the most effective way to contact victims’ families, obtaining the information needed to convey information while minimizing harm to those already traumatized?
Caring for Our Own
Covering a disaster puts enormous physical and psychological stresses on journalists.
“We all know there is a great tradition among journalists to put your feeligns and fears behind you, and just get the job done,” William Schmidt, associate managing editor of The New York Times, wrote his colleagues two days after the World Trade Center attacks. “But we also know that just doing your job as a reporter or photographer out in the streets, or as an editor or clerk in the newsroom, takes its toll on you, and your family.” The paper offered counseling and forums where staffers could share their feelings and experiences.
How will your newsroom take care of the people who come face to face with tragedy, see the bodies, smell the burned flesh, interview the grieving victims?
What provisions will be made to give more than free pizza to sustain a staff, phyiscally and mentally, that is putting in double and triple shifts to make sure their communities get the news coverage that a local disaster demands?
If disaster stikes in your community:
Are you ready?
What steps should newsrooms take to prepare for a disaster in their community?
