Organizational strategy and revenue
If you have prepared an emergency plan, you have spent some time thinking about how you can best respond and share information during an emergency — but there will inevitably be unexpected events that occur, including how long the emergency will last. Depending on the size of your outlet, or if you are an independent journalist, you may have already established relationships with other outlets or people who can help support you during an emergency, but there are some basic steps you can take to prioritize making sure you are thinking about accessibility and sustainability in the middle of a disaster.
Your emergency plan should cover specific workflows around assignments, information about emergency sources, reporting, fact-checking, and publishing, but you will want to establish ways to easily share information and coordinate amongst your staff in the middle of an emergency, even if you do not have these in place.
Legally, you must understand the requirements for journalists covering emergencies, and what access media is allowed to have to disaster areas, evacuated zones, or other related situations. Press access varies by state, and it’s helpful to have official press passes, business cards, and even a copy of applicable ordinances with you if you are reporting in the field. For example, if you may legally be allowed access, the person stationed at a closed road leading to an evacuation zone may not be as familiar with the laws, so having a reference and contacts for media lawyers or press advocacy organizations can be useful if you face barriers.
Scheduling and check-ins
Making sure you have a clear schedule of checking in with newsroom staff, anyone out in the field, and other people involved in your outlet’s disaster response is an important part of internal communication and coordination during an emergency, including having shared maps and schedules with everyone’s location. This will ensure that there are not significant delays in reaching staff who may be out in the field, and establish regular opportunities for people to share their needs or plan to take time off. If possible, you may want to consider rotating who is covering different aspects of the emergencies, or building in time for outside support staff to cover specific shifts in advance.
Predicting how long it will take for the immediate dangers posed by different disasters can be difficult as each event can vary wildly. Once the immediate impacts of a disaster have subsided, recovery and rebuilding can take months or years — so it is important to make sure you are planning for a sustainable pace of coverage and identify if there are specific beats or areas that your reporting can best serve the community. Having some limits and boundaries will also create a helpful structure in light of potential trauma, mental health challenges, exhaustion, and burnout that can occur.
It can be especially difficult for journalists working in their communities to set limits and take breaks during an emergency, so establishing boundaries for types of coverage, shifts, and opportunities to process and share with team members can be particularly helpful.
Having a shared document that can be handed off to the next person, such as a report put together at the end of a shift, or a “sit rep,” is another useful tool you can use internally. This should include the current status of any important developments or updated information related to the emergency, as well as internal operations and staff.
Budgeting and fundraising
An emergency can disrupt your news outlet’s revenue streams, but it can also be an important time to reach a broad audience, who might continue to follow your outlet once the emergency has ended. This may require implementing creative strategies during an emergency depending on your outlet’s needs.
If possible, newsroom leaders should identify clear time off, overtime, and reimbursement policies related to a potential disaster in advance, and include a budget for equipment, emergency expenses such as travel, hotels, medical care, or other food and shelter needs. Staff should be aware of limitations around budgeting or resources and managers should make every effort to prevent burnout in creating schedules, or asking staff to shoulder costs pre-reimbursements. Cash on hand should be available in case power outages occur, as credit cards, ATMS, and checks may not be accepted in disaster areas.
To serve the broadest audience possible, we recommend news outlets remove any paywalls during emergency coverage, and be generous with related information — many people seeking information may not have the capacity to sign up for a subscription mid-emergency, but could potentially subscribe at a later date. Emergency coverage can often lead to high volumes of traffic and engagement, so you may want to consider ways to connect with your audiences that you can further develop in the future.
If your outlet relies on advertising or sponsorship revenue, it’s possible that your local advertisers may need to cancel their campaigns during an emergency — or that you will be approached with new opportunities for disaster-related outreach. If you are displaying ads on a website that may impact the load time, you might consider removing these to improve access to your website. Similarly, you may want to remove ongoing pop-ups or promotional campaigns that create barriers to accessing your reporting.
It is important to ask for contributions during an emergency, particularly if staff needs to evacuate or cover an event exceeding your outlet’s budget. In addition, you may receive requests from people who want to support your coverage. Consider making an ‘ask if needed’, or setting up easy ways for readers to contribute that won’t require substantial staff time or resources to maintain or update so you can devote attention to other organizational needs.
Essential information and valuable local coverage during an emergency can be a significant way to reach new audiences, build engagement and trust, and develop additional revenue streams via memberships, advertising and sponsorships, and grants. If your community values your coverage, this can be an important way to help increase your budget for staff, fund equipment, or expand coverage. You may want to consider establishing a specific sponsorship for your emergency or preparedness coverage, creating an equipment wish list, or approaching funders to support expanded breaking news coverage or evergreen materials to help improve emergency preparedness community-wide.
Providing information during an emergency can also have a significant impact and expand your reach. If you are able to provide a reliable, accurate, and useful source of information during an emergency, you will be able to establish trust and gain new audiences, who may engage with a wide range of coverage and support your work throughout the year. This is also a useful opportunity to provide transparency about the costs of your coverage, your editorial processes, and why audiences may want to support your outlet overall.
Publishing platforms and style for disaster coverage
As part of considering your role in the information ecosystem and the different audiences you might serve, you should be thoughtful about how you are sharing information on different platforms, and how what you publish may be seen, updated, and shared. This includes who you will be reaching on each platform, with a focus on providing information in the most broadly accessible way possible — or you may choose to focus on a specific audience or type of coverage that you know is not being covered.
Who are you reaching, and how?
One aspect to consider is how the agencies involved in your local emergency response are sharing information, and if you can direct your audience to those official sources, or if it’s helpful to share that via another platform. For example, local governments may share updates on social media, or a press conference in only one language, or they may share large files or maps that may be difficult to load, and you may want to find alternative ways to share that information with residents who can’t access them. Other agencies may provide daily updates at specific times, so you may want to alert your audience that you will have new information at the top of each hour, or at a specific time each evening — or make it clear you don’t know when an update will be available. As the event unfolds, you may want to take screenshots or find other ways to document these official announcements, in case there are errors or important information that is later edited that you will want to refer to.
Helping your audience locate official sources of information and being transparent about your fact-checking and how you receive updates will save you time and resources for other reporting, and build trust, engagement, and loyalty as your audience better understands how and when information is being shared.
If you are publishing online, consider whether you have alternative ways to share information if your website goes down, or if you may need a version of a site that is easy to load or text only in case of limited connectivity. If you display ads or use pop-ups, you may want to consider a version that does not include graphics or videos, or changing your pop-up or menu to highlight your most current emergency reporting.
To the extent possible, you should identify the types of information that you may be repeating often, and how people are getting their information, and use that to adjust your response. You may want to create evergreen resources in advance, or during an emergency, such as embedding a statewide fire or air quality map, or other types of explanatory content that you can reuse and reference for your audience (see more examples here).
You may want to make specific efforts to engage with people who are not included in official information channels, such as working with translators, partnering with community groups, or setting up a table in a public place where you know people are gathering. Since people will already be seeking out information from sources they trust, consider the ways you can collaborate with existing organizations to expand your reach and better engage with the needs of those communities. This could include collaborating with other media outlets to cover a broader area and expand your reach, or working with specific community groups to share information and connect with sources since communications networks can be disrupted during disasters. If you are directly sharing information from other news outlets or community groups, however, you may want to do additional fact-checking or include disclaimers.
If there is a need, you may want to create a new news product as a way to distribute information, such as an SMS text product, a disaster-specific newsletter, or a new social media account. This decision should be based on organizational capacity, and how useful or what value this will provide to your audience since it will take extra effort to make your audience aware of this new option. This is primarily recommended if you can assess that you can maintain an additional method of reaching people and that it is a better method to do so than the platforms you are already using.
For example, several news outlets have launched SMS products during emergencies, since texts are often one of the easiest ways to reach people in remote areas or who have limited cell or internet connectivity. However, launching and promoting a new text line, answering questions, and responding to inquiries, may take significant resources if you do not already have this audience established, plus additional costs to use existing SMS services.
Breaking news
If you are providing live or frequent updates as part of your emergency response, you should consider how to make the most current information easy to find on different platforms. Your outlet may already have established policies for breaking news coverage, but if not, you should consider the simplest ways to meet your audience where they are already getting information, and how best to provide updates so the most current information is highlighted.
Ideally, you will have established clear processes and workflows for when and how to alert your audience of a breaking news or emergency event, both during your regular coverage schedule and after hours. Your emergency plan should outline a process for assigning stories, editing, publishing, and distribution for different kinds of emergencies. If possible, this should include definitions of how and when you will respond to emergencies, guidelines for the use of specific platforms and distribution methods in a variety of circumstances, and ways to coordinate with reporters in the field.
In the case of an outage or other large-scale emergency that may create barriers to publishing, you may want to call on outside support to access information unavailable to those at the center of the event before reporting or uploading files. For example, a reporter in the field may need to drive to a specific location to check in or upload text, audio, or photographs, with an editor located somewhere with better connectivity. You should be backing up files regularly to make sure no reporting is lost during the event. If you are utilizing reporting or editorial support from outside the area, you may need to do additional fact-checking to ensure that local details are relevant or accurate.
On a website, it can be helpful to dedicate a specific URL for each day of an event, or for a specific event itself, that you can update regularly. On social media, you may want to include a clear time and date in each post since people may not see the posts in chronological order, or pay attention to what hashtags are being used, to make sure people searching for information can easily find the most accurate info at the time. If you have an email newsletter, you may want to increase the frequency.
If you are planning to share live coverage via video, consider adding captions, which can be set up via Facebook Live, Youtube, and other streaming platforms, a transcript or summary, or translation if possible. While this kind of coverage can provide valuable insights to your audience, it also presents additional potential challenges for your audience: you may risk sharing personal information, such as houses destroyed, or sensitive footage of fatalities. Reporters who are planning to share live footage of emergencies that could include this type of footage, as well as live interviews with survivors, should be aware of your outlet’s ethical policies for sensitive recordings.
What do people need and want to know?
Thinking through where your outlet can fit in the information flow and how you can serve these different audiences is an important strategy in considering your disaster response. It may be the case that you want to fill important gaps or answer questions from your readers, or you may decide that you are better equipped to share individual stories or conduct investigative work.
You may have already considered this when putting together an emergency plan, or based on your knowledge of your audience or general coverage strategy, and you may have existing ways to engage and identify what type of coverage will be most useful. It’s possible, however, that you may decide to change your response based on perceived needs. Using your existing relationships, as well as conducting outreach in person and through your existing platforms, will help you identify what your audience wants to know, and what kinds of information emergency response officials or community organizations think is important to share widely. You can also use tools such as SEO or survey social media to identify the top trends and how you can best address them.
The biggest questions that come up immediately during a disaster, aside from the event details, are how people can get help, and how they can offer help. For those at the center of the disaster or facing impacts, having access to reliable information about evacuation, shelter, or other important resources is the most essential need, whereas others will be trying to get information about or relay information to their loved ones, but may be located far from the scene of the disaster.
Thinking through where your outlet can fit in the information flow and how you can serve these different audiences is an important strategy in considering your disaster response. You may want to consider creating an FAQ, or a dedicated place where resources and ways to help are findable.
Clearly explaining why you are making certain coverage decisions, when and how you will be providing updates, and considering a range of different types of coverage — or not — will help establish clear expectations and ways to engage your audience, as well as build trust through transparency. Depending on the size of the event and your outlet, you may want to focus only on emergency coverage once an event reaches a certain level or limit yourself to a specific type or aspect of reporting.
Verification
It’s important to make sure you are taking extra steps to include fact-checking and as much transparency as possible during your emergency coverage, and it is also helpful to provide as much information as you can, and explain to your audience your news-gathering process to ensure you are providing reliable information and maintaining trust. Information, as well as rumors, can spread extremely quickly during a disaster, and so making sure your reporting is clear and accurate should be the highest accuracy.
There are a number of factors that you will need to keep in mind while reporting on emergencies and verifying information from the field. There can often be significant delays between official reports from emergency response agencies, and there are additional delays that can occur between developments in the field and the public information officers in offices. For example, a wildland fire in a remote area may be growing quickly in a place with limited cell connectivity, and public maps of the fire may only be updated once a day. Explaining the processes behind the official updates, as well as sharing information from agencies and press conferences with your audience, makes it easier for your audience to understand how information becomes available and when.
If an emergency reaches a certain size, the response personnel will likely include people from out of the area, who may not use common names for roads or locations, or who may be unfamiliar with local landscapes or topography, and who may use a more centralized system for media inquiries. This can create additional challenges for reporters in verifying information from community members and sources, or in providing the most current developments to your audience.
An additional level of confusion can be created when other news outlets arrive, who also may not be familiar with the area, and who are not primarily covering the event for a local audience. This may include large national or international outlets, freelancers, or independent journalists who focus on covering specific disasters. In these circumstances, it is especially important to make sure you are carrying appropriate press credentials and are familiar with the safety requirements and laws for press access in your area. You may want to try to collaborate with other media outlets, or be approached to contribute coverage, or depending on the news outlet, you may want to do additional fact-checking before considering sharing coverage. In certain circumstances, it may be appropriate to publish reporting that fact-checks other media claims if wide-spread confusion occurs.
For local reporters, community members can be an essential source of information about the impacts of a disaster, whether it is the extent of power outages, or experiences with official agencies or law enforcement. However, it is important to ensure you are undertaking rigorous fact-checking before sharing details from residents, just as you might during any other reporting process. Due to the heightened environment in which many people may be operating, it may be important to take extra caution to clarify specific details such as the time, date, and location, and any documentation, for tips you receive. It may be helpful to set up a dedicated method or survey for residents to submit questions and tips, which can be designed to include basic information. If so, you should make sure you are able to devote resources to answering and utilizing those responses. Depending on the circumstances, the information you receive from community members may also be useful to community partners, or official emergency response agencies, or your own reporting in the future.
Increasingly, climate emergencies can lead to harmful misinformation, ranging from speculations on the cause of an event to incorrect information about government response or the scale of a specific event — and these can spread quickly. Whenever possible, coverage should include links to official sources, transparent explanations of original reporting and fact-checking procedures, and clear context about what information is being shared and why, in order to address rumors or other misinformation. If necessary, you may want to dedicate resources to include reporting that undertakes fact-checking of widespread rumors, with an explanation of how your news outlet is confirming various sources of information.
Ethics in disaster reporting
Reporting during the middle of an emergency can be similar to covering breaking news, but the impacts are often far more wide-spread. If your outlet has existing policies for covering fatalities, showing potentially distressing images, or sharing specific details of injuries, property destruction, or other similar events, you may want to adapt these during your coverage of a more wide-spread disaster. If you do not currently cover breaking news or have these types of policies, you should consider the potential news value of sharing visual documentation or detailed information about personal tragedies during an emergency. This might include whether to livestream footage of emergency survivors or an ongoing scene of disaster recovery, fatalities, specific houses that have been destroyed, or other information that could broadcast personal tragedies prior to those impacted receiving official notification.
Different news outlets may decide to handle these decisions differently, and with the increasing coverage of disasters via social media platforms and documenting of events by residents and independent journalists, you should also be prepared for this kind of information to be shared by other outlets. Since information from official agencies can be limited and delayed, details such as property destruction of specific places, or fatalities and their unofficial causes may spread rapidly. When possible, explain to your audience how and why you are making these kinds of coverage decisions, which can increase transparency and trust.
Newsrooms and journalists should include trauma-informed reporting practices and establish policies for mental health support within the organization. More information about mental health during emergencies can be found here.