A heartfelt thanks to all the people who wrote in out of concern for my family and me vis a vis the San Diego fires. We’re fine, and very proud of the wonderful and loving way our entire community has responded to a shared tragedy.
I’m also very proud of the role our local Websites responded – and national aggregators, like Topix.net. They have been fantastic.
I’ve actually been on the East Coast this week. As you can imagine, I have been extremely eager for any tidbits of news about the “voluntary evacuations,” our residences, and our communities, perhaps in that order.
It took awhile to get good reports from anyone. One of our two major highways was closed, other roads were clogged and I think nobody had any idea what was going on for many hours.
After the initial catch-up period, however, the local media came through –especially The San Diego Union Tribune’s SignOn San Diego, which demonstrated how newspapers can use the Internet tools at their disposal to bring the community together in a way that perhaps no one else can.
If anyone doubts the relevancy of a newspaper in the age of the Internet, all they need to do is look at the incredible job that Chris Jennewein and Ron James and their teams did at SignOn this week. Complementing its news coverage, SignOn went Web 2.0 in a big way, adding a fire radio station on the fly to its normal local music radio station. It posted videos on YouTube, and a photo archive. It regularly updated a fire blog (“Mira Costa College has closed”).
And it hosted a number of well attended forums, with amazing input on everything that was fire related (“ Take special precautions when cleaning up ash. Most important: Lightly mist indoor and outdoor hard surfaces before gently sweeping ash. On lightly dusted areas, a damp cloth or wet mop may be all that is needed”)
SignOn, of course, was not the only local media service on the job. Topix.net also proved to be of real utility, aggregating all the other media sources; bringing in good community content; and adding many more local voices. One of its areas got 514 comments from both the area and beyond.
The local TV stations, for their part, also did a particularly fine job extending their on air coverage with highly relevant fire maps and useful updates on closings. CBS8 had a nice feature on houses that had burned down, neighborhood by neighborhood.
All of it was useful, and expertly done. But to me, what was noteworthy wasn’t when the newspaper did its regular story, or a TV station got a video up: it was the Web 2.0 social media extensions that really engaged the community and brought things to life.
Peter, glad to hear you, and a number of other folks in SoCal were not directly impacted by the fires. Thought of you and Dick L., Rob L, et al out there this week. Best, Jeff
Peter - that is a nice blog tribute and fantastic tesimonial to how people who are seemingly wrapped up in their daily lives really pull together in a crisis.
Fantastic news, Peter - thanks for sharing. It’s certainly been a tough week for anyone in Southern California - and for all of us with friends and family in the area. Nice to hear that you all are ok.
Regarding the rest of your post - I think in these times of “changing business models”, it’s easy to forget about the critical role of local media in our lives. Great job highlighting the really important work done by so many media professionals to help connect people to the information and context that was so important in these past few days.
Even though KPBS (89.5 FM) lost its transmitter to the fires, they also deserve credit for doing an excellent job. Another radio station donated their broadcast signal to KPBS during the emergency and KPBS’s webstream also stayed online. KPBS also should get credit for putting up a detailed Google map that they were able to keep updated throughout the fires. However, I found the headlines that they posted on Twitter (I believe it was) to be annoying mostly because they sometimes felt like teasers that did not link back to more information.
I also took to downloading the official disaster maps from http://www.sdcountyemergency.com/, but I think that they could have been a bit more informative and user friendly (i.e. place different types of information on different layers of the map) and should have been updated more often, particularly after traditional business hours.
Finally, you are right that the fireblog posted by the U-T’s signonsandiego.com was an excellent resource, and so were the responses from readers, making it the info source that I consulted most.
-MAK
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