More about the fires …
… at Clicked — a blog from MSNBC.com that’s about breaking news online.
Clicked offers a wide-ranging look at who is covering the fires, and how they’re doing it.
Update (10:32 a.m.): USA Today has two very cool fire features online — a continually updated fire map, and an explanatory graphic that shows how that map is evolving over time. The latter is great instructional material for multimedia journalists.
The embedding of the “Wildfire Primer” (button at top, far right) is very nice. USA Today understands that it’s lousy UI to make package elements fly out into new windows. Hooray!
Having just returned home to a house still standing (thankfully) - I have some thoughts about online media coverage of the San Diego fires.
October 26, 2007 at 3:47 pmI evacuated to my mom’s in the Palm Springs area. I had no live access to San Diego TV or radio news. Unfortunately, I had only sporadic and unreliable Internet access. When I did get a chance to go online, the FIRST thing I wanted to know was if the fire had reached my house.
That information was hard to get.
In my opinion, the media here did a poor job of hyperlocal journalism online. It was nearly impossible to easily find specific info about the neighborhoods - the focus of the coverage (even online) was on the hardest hit areas or human interest/drama stories and photos. Sure the photos were dramatic, but as a resident, I had no context as to exactly where they were taken (link them to a map!).
Then, most outlets finally listed addresses of the houses burned but they didn’t overlay it on a geographic Google map of the area so I still couldn’t pinpoint where most of the actual damage was happening. I could see where the fires were, but not where the houses were being burned.
The most valuable hyperlocal resource I ended up finding (and it took awhile to find it) was a forum set up on the Union Tribune’s web site for neighborhood discussions. All postings were done by local residents. That’s how I finally knew my neighborhood was OK!
Despite all the high-tech tools, the regional coverage wasn’t all that useful to me. Traffic information on the Union Tribune sites hadn’t been updated in two days by the time I headed home yesterday!
On the day I evacuated, TV was the best resource, followed by radio as I was trying to make my way out of the region.
Newspapers - when they were delivered - were useless (and dirty from all the ash)!
Overall, radio did the best job because they were able to break the formula and just take calls from people in the field, interspered with all the official information, traffic, etc. I felt like I was losing a lifeline when I got out of signal range!
Rebecca, did you use the Wikipedia page?
October 26, 2007 at 4:17 pmI’m glad you found our map useful, and appreciate the timeline tracking the map’s evolution throughout Tuesday. As lead designer, it was my responsibility to create the look and feel of the interface and graphics. I worked with members of our staff to integrate the maps and multimedia elements. We’ve made numerous updates since then, and have added a new feature called the “Map update log.” It is located at the bottom right of the map. Users can scroll through a list of every major update.
October 26, 2007 at 10:55 pmThanks for leaving a comment, Ron. I saw the map update log earlier — nice feature.
October 26, 2007 at 11:18 pm