ONA Issues

Ed. note: This is a submission from Kelly Fincham, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Hofstra University. You can submit posts to ONA Issues here. We’re especially interested in resources, original reporting and opinion pieces that speak to media issues in the digital age. 

This week I should have been teaching two sections of Journalism 80, the online journalism class at Hofstra University on Long Island. Instead, I have been co-ordinating Long Island Report’s coverage of Hurricane Sandy with Hofstra students from a (thankfully) powered apartment in the New York suburb of Yonkers. Equipped with little more than cellphones, the Long Island-based students have texted, tweeted, Facebooked and YouTubed the coverage of the massive storm and its devastating effect.

The students faced enormous challenges in filing copy. Firstly, the students who remained at Hofstra had internet access but were confined to campus as parkways were closed. In contrast, students who had returned to their Long Island homes could report on the devastation first-hand but were unable to transmit stories because they had no power or internet. There were - and continue to be - significant power outages on Long Island. At the time of writing more than 600,000 residents are still without power.

Our usual submission process– shared Google docs or direct log-ins to the student news site– was a non-starter because of the internet issue. One student spent a frustrating five hours trying to create a Storify as the connection repeatedly failed. Phone service was hampered as cell towers were knocked out of action with the power outages which reduced smartphone functionality to tweeting or posting to Facebook.

We faced the ultimate reporter’s dilemma. A huge story - literally in our back yard - and no real way to cover it. Luckily, we already had a social media reporting strategy in place that we had developed just two weeks earlier for the Hofstra Debate. In that instance we were driven to be creative by limited access to the media center. This time the circumstances were much different.  But, the principle was still the same: getting the story out.

Here’s how we did it.

Organization

1) Create small team of people whose work is solely editing and copy editing.  They will be the last pair of eyes for all content on the site. We had five editors for the debate and one editor for #sandy with power-permitting back-up from two others.

2) Email every student in the journalism department and invite them to join a Facebook Group specifically set up for Long Island Report. We had 153 in place by the night of the debate.

3) Use that Facebook Group as the command center. Editors post in story ideas and questions while reporters use it to file photographs and copy

4) Create a second hashtag for the story so editors can find posts on Twitter.  This didn’t turn out to be as much of a pain as I expected. We used #hofdebate for the debate and #lireport for Sandy.

5) On Twitter, make sure students sign up to the texting service so they can text their tweets for speed.

Filing copy
Use Facebook, Twitter and text messages to post updates and images. One student used Twitter exclusively to report from Island Park on Long Island after Sandy.

Filing images
Use Facebook for posting images. We only discovered in the heat of the debate that Twitter limits users to 200 pictures a day. Much more useful to use Facebook. Students took pictures with smartphones and posted directly into the dedicated Facebook group with captions and user information.

Filing video
Post unedited video to a student’s own YouTube account and send a link to LIR editors. Our editors could then download the video, edit and package and repost to the Long Island Report YouTube account which pushed the video to the site’s front page.

Editing copy
We used a mix of posts from WordPress posts and Storify to publish the stories. We even created quick and dirty slideshows with Slideshow like this one.

How it worked out

Once all these things were in place we were able to actually start work. The assignment for the students was simple. Tell us what  you see. Take pictures. Take video. Send it back to us and we will build a news story from it. Some articles were written directly into Facebook. For example this article by Jill Goldstein started life as a Facebook post. We had used Storify for many of the debate articles and again for Hurricane Sandy because it gave our editors a way to build stories based on the social media reporting being done by students like this Storify from Kristen Maldonado.

But we were continually challenged by the unreliable internet access. In fact, the internet connection on Long Island was so poor that some students could only text information to me via SMS which I would then paste into a WordPress article. So, for the Hurricane Sandy coverage, I created a Rebel Mouse page and embedded that in our site’s front page. This way, we could showcase copy the minute it was posted on Facebook or Twitter as well as promoting stories published on our own CMS. This meant that our front page was constantly being updated with content tagged for #lireport. It worked so well that I am using another Rebel Mouse page for an election night project.

Over the course of the past two weeks my students have developed battle-hardened disaster and political reporting skills that would have been impossible in the traditional classroom setting.

Who’s hiring?