Are you and your news site ready for your local armageddon?

Stuff happens and we report it, quickly and accurately.

That’s basically what journalists do.

When really bad stuff happens to our communities it’s exponentially more important that we’re equipped to serve them quickly and accurately.

9-11. The Virginia Tech shootings. And most recently, the I-35 tragedy in Minnesota are all notable tragedies where journalists had to really step up and do their best reporting on the fly for long hours without warning.

Beyond doing the ‘localized story’ of a tragedy like this, it’s also a good time to do a gut check on your staff and site to see if you have the resources (all that you can given time/budgets/technical restraints) available to do the best reporting the fastest way possible.

Some of you may have watched Wikipedia during the I35 bridge collapse. It was astounding to see all the information funneling in and self-correcting by unpaid editors/contributors. Googlezon-esque.

Part of newspapers’ strength is the speed and accuracy they can deliver. If we’re going to remain relevant and not replaced by Wikipedia, we need to prepare our resources now before big bad news breaks.

So ask yourself: how prepared are you and your site for a tragedy to hit your community?

• Is your web team able to flex work hours, responsibilities and skills?
• Do you need freelancers or others in the newsroom that can sit in and help publish the massive stream of content you’ll have?
• (I really shouldn’t need to say this in August 2007 but…) Is your newsroom logistically ready to file and edit for the web before print?
• Do you have some sort of tools (forums, message boards or databases) for family/friend contacts if people are missing, databasing opening/closings or any other searchable, community information opportunities?
• Do you have a breaking news blog ready at the flick of a switch?
• Does your site have an ‘armageddon’ design? (So that you can drop a package above the fold for massive news with huge images and headline fonts?)
• Is all of your reporting staff skilled in editing and filing remotely for stories, photos, audio and video? Do they regularly do it? (Believe me, working tech support remotely can sometimes be more frustrating that not having any extra multimedia content from the scene.)
• Is your workflow streamlined and standardized so that turning multimedia content quickly is easy?
• Have you explored the social media tools already available out there so that you can use to connect people with information?
• What about social contributions to maps?
• What about social sharing of news tips?
• What about social sharing of photos, video, audio?
• How are you going to solicit, retain and manage all that social stuff? (An email account and one body probably won’t cut it.)
• Even tech issues like, do you have the bandwidth available to handle getting slammed? What can you jettison in times of emergency to make your site move faster? (For instance, Roanoke, cut some of their ad serving during the Virginia Tech shootings to keep the site trudging on.)
• Have you talked among department leaders about this plan? Who’s mission control? Who’s below that?
• Is this plan written down somewhere and reviewed occasionally among all the staff?

This is just the tip of the iceberg of questions you need to ask yourself.

Each year in South Florida, starting about now, hurricane season picks up and we’re on guard. But even then, we usually have 2-7 days to prepare for the chaos.

Most disastrous events that could affect your community aren’t trackable by barometric pressure.

Now is a good time to track your paper’s resources and see how you can prepare for what storm may be heading your way.

It is times of tragedy that you really find out what your made of.

It is those times of tragedy that people really appreciate and acknowledge the relevancy of what newspapers do.