AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Terry and I have often written about how businesses can be news centers, too. I have to give a special hat tip to the people behind GustavBloggers.com. Who are they? Just a bunch of tecchies at the Zipa datacenter in downtown New Orleans. They’re there, they’re working, they had to keep communications flowing during the storm and they had some damn good insight into what was happening.

I want to get something straight from the start: the news organizations that I could see online did a terrific job with storm coverage. Clearly, we have learned our lessons from Katrina. Terry wrote above about how some anchors reinvented themselves and how it showed during the storm. Websites were more prepared and had better information. The online effort was remarkable and laudable.

I just want to point to one small piece of the Web to indicate the change that’s happening in how we get information. Part of the news river came from techhies. If you look at their blog, it’s every bit as good and useful as a “professional” news blog.

There’s also a lesson here about search: look for “Gustav Blog” on Google, and GustavBloggers.com - a site that didn’t exist a couple of weeks ago - comes up sixth. The techs secured their own URL, dedicated their own space to the site and other sites began linking in immediately. Because they used WordPress, the site “speaks” easily with search. From nothing to sixth in no time - impressive.

The entries are excellent - the folks at GustavBloggers posted 53 of them on Monday. They had an excellent view from their datacenter, so we see plenty of pictures including some pretty dramatic scenes and a strangely pretty one. When we talk about the shift to Continuous News - this is it.

It’s not a matter of Us vs. Them. We’re in it together, especially in a crisis. News stations are excellent at giving the big picture during storms. The GustavBloggers gave us a slice of life - and one that was equally newsworthy.