Quick Thoughts on The Flood of 2009

I haven’t had a lot of time to take a step back and consider the events of the past three days.  I really wish many of you could be a fly on the wall in our newsroom during large-scale breaking news events such as this.

My experience during this event has been different than in the past.  With my background as a reporter, I’m used to being “in the field” during breaking news.  In many ways, I prefer to be where the story is.  But this week, I’ve been in the newsroom,  monitoring viewer submitted photos and videos and social networks.

For thoughts on the local media’s social media response My Urban Report has a great summary of the action.  I appreciate the nod is Amani’s analysis.

Another big nod goes to the Atlanta Twitter and non-mainstream media community.  The folks out there did a great job of keeping each other informed of the developments, even organizing the conversation with the #atlflood and #atlfloods hashtags.

Here at the station, I’m looking forward to the after action review of our coverage.  As usual, our team of journalists did an extraordinary job covering the story.  That being said, I think we are learning some important lessons about our engagement in social media during big stories like the flood.  We have a handful of reporters who have been tweeting constantly, our challenge is exposing the Twitter community to our reporters.

By monitoring Twitter, our newsroom was exposed to more breaking news as it happened.  Obviously there are a lot of rumors, but our assignment editors were able to take the Tweet leads and work towards independent confirmation.

Finally, I was amazed at the number of pictures and video people submitted to our website, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.  Armed with little more than cell phone cameras in most instances, people were able to contribute greatly to the overall news coverage of the widespread flooding.

As I said earlier, I haven’t had a chance to decompress yet.  But I’ll work towards more analysis in the coming days.