Just Because New Orleans is Being Evacuated Doesn’t Mean It Does Without Its Daily Morning Newspaper -- It’s Internet Convergence At Its Utmost with the Times-Picayune Publishing Only PDF Internet Pages.
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Philip M. Stone September 1, 2005

No matter how much a media entity plans for the worst, what newspaper could plan for this -- one day it’s a thriving publication with 270,000 daily circulation and the next day almost its entire subscriber base is gone, your beloved city is 80% under water, and your own building is no longer habitable.

So the newspaper delivery trucks were put to good use – instead of delivering newspapers they were packed full of staffers and management and they drove to other newspaper sites out of town not so affected by the storm so they could still put out a newspaper. There was really no point in actually printing a newspaper – how could it be delivered and besides, people weren’t at home any more – so the newspaper turned to the Internet and published pdf files of its abbreviated daily newspaper.

Even with that brilliant idea the problem is that not too many people on the Gulf Coast got to read even those pdf pages in the short term – electricity is out in many places, homes are inhabitable and likely to remain that way for months, entire communities demolished -- it truly is a disaster on a scale that America may not have seen since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The mayor of one Mississippi town who flew over the devastation said, “This is our Tsunami.”  And that brought up an interesting point – sitting in Geneva and watching CNN International and BBC World, and remembering their wall-to-wall Tsunami coverage for more than a week with hardly any commercial breaks, this Gulf Coast coverage was very different. It was the leading news item for about 10 minutes on most newscasts and then it was on to other things.

When Katrina hit Louisiana land CNN International simulcast CNN US and while the weather radar tracking was really fascinating, and the on-the-spot reports from reporters right in the thick of things was as one would expect, there were still the normal commercial breaks – very very different from Tsunami coverage.

How come such a difference in play? Could it be that editors were slow off the mark to recognize the magnitude of the story?

With the Tsunami, of course, casualty rates grew by the hour to eventually reach more than 150,000. With Katrina officials said bluntly they had more important things to do at the moment than count, let alone retrieve, the dead, but now reports are coming in that many communities may have lost hundreds of people, and New Orleans thinks it may have lost thousands. New Orleans residents were told to evacuate, but some 200,000 did not. In other communities it seems a lot of people stayed put until plucked from their house roofs. Television video shows people in the streets chest high with water. The fatalities probably won’t reach anywhere near those of the Tsunami, but still bad enough.

The Tsunami, of course, was unexpected. It came without warning. For Katrina the best weather tracking equipment that money could buy followed its every move. Warnings were given and while the media played it as the number one story there just seemed to be something missing, as if they didn’t think things would turn out too bad after all.

The Tsunami happened in parts of the world that lacked funds for the major recovery efforts that would be necessary. Katrina occurred in the world’s richest country – not so much of a story, apparently.

And much of the Katrina story moved quickly from the unfolding human tragedy to what it would mean to the pocket book. Gasoline now at $3 a gallon may go to $4 – (putting that in perspective here in Switzerland we pay – without any Katrina -- close to $5 a gallon.)

Now the casualty figures are coming in and they look as though they will be much higher than anyone might have feared, the true extent to how hundreds of thousands of people are homeless, and may be that way for many months, and the true horror of what is still happening on the ground, including the looting,  makes this a tragedy unlike any other.

The American public, as usual, gave a heads-up to the media just how important it thought this story was.

CNN and MSNBC both reported that they had moved more than 9 million video streams within a 24-hour period on their sites. If ever proof was needed that video is now an integral part of a news organization’s web site then surely Katrina has proved it. MSNBCs previous record had been set earlier in the month when it streamed 5.3 million times the landing of the space shuttle. For CNN Katrina more than doubled its previous record for the London bombings in July.

One surprise, until you thought about it for a while, was that there were relatively few citizen contributions from the area for print or pictures. But when you then take into account that electricity was out, the mobile networks were out, and the only way some media organizations found they could communicate was via their satellite phones, then the lack of citizen text and pictures becomes understandable.

Companies that monitor web site activities reported many of the major news and weather sites were inundated for Katrina requests, and response time became longer, but they withstood the onslaught.

Even Craigslist, the classified advertising web thorn to newspapers, was doing its bit to help. On its New Orleans site in the  “free stuff” section the public from around the country were posting offers of clothes, to make phone calls to let loved ones know people were still alive and the like. A typical example, “I’ll make long distance calls or email people for you” posted from Chicago.

But it is the Times-Picayune that may be swallowing the bitterest pill of all. Three years ago it published a five-part series entitled “Washing Away” that warned in detail of the very dangers lurking from “The Big One” -- and how the city might cope.  “New Orleans and south Louisiana will always be vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane, yet there are ways to make the area safer. But implementing the proposals may be prohibitively expensive.”

Well, the Big One finally hit. Implementing those proposals then would probably have cost much less than the federal, state, and local governments will now spend to get the Gulf Coast back on its feet. And that will take years.

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RAB (US) Makes On-Line Auction Free for Hurricane Relief Fund Raisers – September 5, 2005

text of RAB US press release

The Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB US) is making its online auction software, ezAuction available free of charge to any member radio stations that want to use the service for hurricane relief efforts. Only credit card processing fees will apply. This will allow radio stations to generate relief funds that can help the victims of Hurricane Katrina

Existing subscribers or any member station wishing to host a charitable auction may use ezAuction free of charge for up to 60 days for the specific purpose of deploying a charitable auction to benefit Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

For more information or to get started, please contact RAB’s Dave Casper at 972-753-6760 or email dcasper@rab.com.