‘Welcome To My Home’ The Television Journalist Told Viewers Watching Around The World, And He Turned To Show Behind Him His House Burning To The Ground

“That was our garage, our living room over there, our porch, bedroom. This was a living hell coming over the hill,” he told his channel 8 viewers. The cable news networks picked it up and showed the clip often around the world.

If anything told the story of the California fires for television, that standup did.

And web users showed yet again that when there is major breaking news in their community it is to the local media web sites to which they flock. Some, like the KPBS San Diego web site were just overwhelmed and died, but other more powerful sites such as the San Diego Union-Tribune saw web traffic soar to 6.7 million page views on the Monday, more than five times the norm. The site got a bit slow at times, but didn’t crash, probably because the newspaper was able to increase capacity from two main servers to eight.

And micro-blog services like Twitter came into their own. Twitter, for instance, allows only 140 characters and there is no support for images but what it really does is offer a way to get information out there very very quickly. It may be brief but in 140 characters you can usually say the basics of what you want to get said.

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With Newspaper Web Sites Continually Adding New Reporting Features And With Universities Turning Out The New Multi-Taskers Here’s A Back To Basics Reminder From The Washington Post Editor: ‘It Doesn’t Matter How Webbie You Are, If You Can’t Report, It Doesn’t Matter.’
Washington played host to a couple of big national journalism conventions last week and some of what got said deserves a wider audience. Like Leonard Downie, editor of the Washington Post, reminding everyone that for all the new technology that journalists must master the focus still needs to be on the basic – how to report.

Newspapers and Broadcasting Are Still Primary News Sources And Internet News, While Growing in Popularity, Still Just Supplements Most Needs
A new major American survey has loads of good news for those who believe traditional media still has a long healthy life ahead, and it has loads of good news for those that believe the Internet continues to grow in news popularity. But dig into it deep enough to sort it all out and there are signs that for traditional media things may not be getting better, but the worst may be over.

'And Now for Your Latest In-Flight Entertainment Turn To Any Channel and Watch How We’re Preparing This Plane to Crash Land; Be Sure to Hear the Experts on the Ground Give the Odds for Our Success!'
And if you think that headline is pure fiction, think again. It just happened!

And while the federal government has been releasing NASA satellite images, they are taken from such a height that while they can give disaster officials an overview of what is going on they don’t provide the road-by-road analysis that is needed. So the media turned to Google Maps and Google Earth and their various tools in producing interactive maps showing exactly where every fire is and how controlled it is. Google has gone out of its way to make its map tools available. “We have seen many publications in Southern California use our free custom mapping tools to share information,” according to Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn.

On the Google blog site Jess Lee, the product manager for Google Maps, says, “Lots of people have pulled together to make maps with information about the fires, including the burn zones, evacuation alerts, evacuation centers, safe areas, and closed roads.” He then listed some of the most widely used fire map sites including KPBS, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, The Union-Tribune and others.

Yahoo is not being left out in the cold, its Flickr site is inundated with fire photos.

Los Angeles being the metropolis it is means there are lots of journalists on the ground from many competing print and broadcast mediums and the competition is fierce, but the scope of this story is so great that there is some TV pooling going on. Stations are taking an advertising revenue hit -- most local TV are giving the story commercial-free blanket coverage -- and they are posting huge amounts of raw video on their digital channels. Everyone is asking the public to send in their stills and video, much of it is a bit scary in its way since many stills and video seemed to be taken as people were escaping areas coming under attack. Doesn’t get much more dramatic than that.

And if ever there was a time for video graphics then this was it. One great one showed how the fires moved so quickly. They would race up the back side of the hill, hit the crest, and then the fierce Santa Ana winds would blow the embers far in front, starting a new fire line down the other side. You can write about that, but actually seeing it via video graphics really does prove there are times when pictures and graphics are worth more than words.

Newspaper delivery has been remarkably unaffected except for those neighborhoods that basically are no more. The Union-Tribune has increased its print run by 30,000, but devoted many of those extra issues to be given free to those displaced at public shelters.

The Los Angeles Times says there are about 2,500 subscribers who, for one fire reason or another, didn’t get their newspaper.

And its web site is doing very well because the maps are giving such localization. In its own way the maps are providing that hyper-local touch that has been talked about so much as how a newspaper web site should be. One person who appreciates that is the Times’ prospective new chairman, Sam Zell.

He owns a house in Malibu where fires were raging. He was told the house was okay, he phoned the wife to tell her, but she told him she knew that already by accessing the Times’ web site.

“Now that’s what the newspaper business should be all about,” Zell said. “That’s making a difference. That’s providing unique local information that’s only available by virtue of who or what we are.”

Helping the media in all of this was that the mobile phone system basically stood up to not only the extra traffic – much of it SMS – but also in conditions where some towers were lost. That meant that journalists could file their text, stills and video stories directly from the scene.

If there is to be any criticism of the media outside of California it is that it took longer than one thought it should for editors to understand just how big this story was. With 1155 homes gone, and still counting, and close to 1 million people ordered evacuated from their homes and still counting, it’s a story on a scale difficult to comprehend, and that is why globally it leads most newscasts.