About
the Local News Go Bag Project
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About the project
The Local News Go Bag project was started in 2023 to provide information, tools, resources and connection for local newsrooms and independent journalists covering emergencies and disasters in their communities. Here’s more about why local disaster reporting is so important.
The guide is maintained by Kate B. Maxwell and is supported by a Reynolds Journalism Institute Innovation Fellowship, in 2023-24. Read more about the project in this article.
The News Go Bag project has been selected for presentation at a number of conferences and workshops, including the RJI Innovation Fellowship 2024, SRCCON 2023, Online News Association in 2024, the Natural Hazards Research Workshop in 2024 and 2025, Society for Environmental Journalists, Virginia Press Association 2025, the Radically Rural Roundtable series, and others. If you are interested in hosting a panel, workshop, or training, please get in touch at [email protected].
Maxwell is the cofounder and former publisher of The Mendocino Voice, a local independent online news outlet started in 2016 based in rural Northern California, and was previously a JSK Community Impact Fellow 2021-22. She has experience covering wildfires, floods, power outages, winter storms, drought, Covid-19, along with a wide range of other topics for online outlets, radio and print.
This guide is focused on community-centered reporting for local journalists and newsrooms covering an emergency or disaster in the community in which they live. Its goal is to identify best community-centered practices and strategies to prepare news outlets and its audiences. As with any emergency, preparing in advance is always recommended — but this guide also includes tips and tools to help journalists during and after a disaster occurs.
The timeline of events from initial warnings to first impacts, to the recovery and rebuilding stage, can vary significantly depending on your circumstances: a fire caused by human error could start unexpectedly and grow rapidly on the first day, but then continue to burn and grow for weeks or months, whereas an approaching hurricane may allow for advanced warning of several days, and be over in a matter of hours. In most cases, however, the recovery and rebuilding process can take months or years.
While covering a disaster, it is essential to make sure that your own physical and mental safety is prioritized, which can seem difficult while undertaking the work of reporting in your community. This guide focuses on ways that reporters and newsroom leaders can prepare and provide resources and support while doing that work.
The toolkit is intended as a customizable resource for newsrooms and includes basic templates and tools in Google Docs and Sheets that you can copy and change, such as an emergency equipment checklist, source list, grant tracker, and exercises to help you prepare and stay organized during your coverage.
If possible, set aside dedicated time to begin to prepare in advance, including creating shared source lists and maps, identifying possible emergency scenarios, making contacts and preparing equipment, and participating in training specific to your area or for different types of emergencies, as well as for your newsroom and new staff. As with any emergency response, preparation is key to being able to respond in the moment — and will help allow you to be flexible and adapt to unexpected needs that will inevitably arise.
In addition, this project includes a list of available resources, and ways for local journalists and newsrooms to connect, ongoing virtual meetups and other ways to build community.
If you’re interested in participating, have suggestions or contributions for the guide, or want to support this project, please get in touch at [email protected] or contact us.
Establishing your definitions of emergency and disaster coverage in advance can help prepare you to establish internal policies and procedures for covering breaking news, or to strategize around the best use of resources for your news outlet. Individual reporters or small news outlets may not be able to provide real-time reporting, daily weather reports, or investigative projects into recovery funding, but thinking through what circumstances might require an emergency response and how you can provide information will help guide your approach.
Depending on the size of your news outlet or the current scope of your coverage, this could include deciding that you will not cover certain types of e emergencies, or establish policies such as: to begin to devote reporting resources to emergencies unless they impact your immediate coverage area, to begin reporting when significant property or life is at risk, when a press conference occurs, or outside resources have been deployed. Thinking about what will prioritize the safety of your newsroom and be most useful for your community are an important factors in establishing what this will mean for you.
Precise use of specific terms is essential to reliable and accurate reporting, and so is the ability to effectively translate these terms for the public. This is particularly true when reporting during an emergency when fast-moving and complex situations and technical jargon can further complicate the job of quickly communicating essential situations. One of the best methods to prepare yourself, your colleagues, and your community is to make sure you understand the official and technical usage of specific emergency terms when covering disasters and to clearly explain this to your audience.
This could include terms like “evacuation advisory” vs. “evacuation warning,” “red flag warning,” or other emergency or health warnings specific to your area. Consider making a guide or glossary to help explain the relevant terms as an easy reference for your audience and staff, so that it is easier to understand the different levels of official emergency response and the agencies involved in these decisions. The same is also true of understanding the larger processes involved in different emergency responses, as well as the different data or types of information that might be useful to understand, such as when and why local governments declare emergencies, how different wildfire agencies coordinate and report on a fire’s progress and cause, or what the historic flooding patterns are for your area.
This guide uses the terms disaster and emergency interchangeably, but it is a purposeful choice to exclude the term “natural disaster.” In most circumstances, the cascading events that constitute the context and response to an emergency and its impact, whether driven by climate change, an industrial accident, or a mass shooting, are shaped by existing structures and related inequalities that are an important factor in understanding what happened to who, and why. As a result, it is usually the most precarious or marginalized residents who feel the greatest impact of disasters, and who are often excluded from official recovery processes.
This guide seeks to outline the different components that shape how a disaster unfolds and to encourage journalists to explore and highlight these structural issues when covering disasters in their work to provide context and clarity for their audience and help them better engage with their local officials and emergency response agencies and organizations. By helping illuminate the ways that specific events occur, and how those impacts are unequally distributed, your reporting can provide insight into how communities can participate in and improve the local recovery process, and identify more equitable solutions to prevent and respond to the next emergency.
2023 was the hottest year in history, and included the greatest number of disasters costing over $1 billion in damage in the United States; between 2011 – 2021, more than 90% of U.S. counties had at least one disaster declaration. For many of us, the question is not if, but when we will experience a disaster in our communities. Local journalists are often best positioned to fill the essential gaps during these emergencies, by providing life-saving information, important context, and key local knowledge and sources to share stories and information on the ground and for those who need it most — but the combination of declining newsroom jobs, particularly in local communities, and the increasing number of life-threatening climate-driven disasters has created an important gap in coverage.
Local news outlets and journalists are often the most informed and connected among those covering disasters and can serve as essential interpreters of information between official response agencies and those experiencing a disaster, particularly for marginalized communities who are often excluded from emergency response processes. However, this can be a double-edged sword: they are often working with fewer resources and have a smaller reach than national news outlets, or may be dealing with the immediate impacts of evacuations or other difficult circumstances themselves. Like other complex and important reporting within and for local communities, this type of coverage can be essential but poses unique challenges for reporters working where they live — like first responders, reporters are exposed to second or first-hand trauma that can make emergency reporting difficult and accumulate over time.
Much of the existing resources are developed for reporters who have been sent to cover a disaster specifically and are arriving on the scene from out of the area. While this may be the case in some circumstances, local reporters can report on the story from the beginning, reach audiences and sources that may be inaccessible from the outside, and provide crucial on-the-ground reporting, fact-checking, and context on everything from local history, structural inequality, political decisions, and a disaster’s impact on different communities. Perhaps most importantly, local reporters will be there after a disaster, to track and hold officials and agencies accountable, and identify useful solutions as a recovery and rebuilding process unfolds. They can provide essential stories and information from the front lines, and help identify important impacts, and assist communities with engaging directly in response and recovery processes, and share crucial insights as to how climate change is unfolding and how local communities can respond..
You can read more about how this has shaped the Local News Bag Project here and here.
The Local News Go Bag project is an ongoing resource to support local news outlets and journalists covering emergencies and disasters in their communities. If you have suggestions for additional resources or changes to the guide, want to connect with journalists covering emergencies, or want to get involved in supporting the project, please get in touch at [email protected] or via our contact page.
As part of the project, we will be holding regular opportunities for journalists and local news supporters to share their experiences and best practices for emergency reporting. If you’d like to participate, sign up here.
To make sure we are providing useful resources, we want to hear from local journalists and news leaders about what would be most helpful to support ongoing coverage of disasters. In the future, we will provide additional resources including training and opportunities and resources to support local journalists doing this work, including helping newsroom begin to put together an emergency plan, engage in training, and audits of existing emergencies strategies. If you’d like to support this work or partner with us, please get in touch.
The News Go Bag project has been selected for presentation at a number of conferences and workshops, including the RJI Innovation Fellowship 2024, SRCCON 2023, Online News Association in 2024, the 2024 Natural Hazards Research Workshop, Society for Environmental Journalists, Virginia Press Association 2025, the Radically Rural Roundtable series, and others. If you are interested in hosting a panel, workshop, or training, please get in touch at [email protected].
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We’re always looking for feedback or ways to expand the project!