Providing Coverage of the Tahoe Fire Without Reporters

As some of you know, I work for the University of Nevada's Reynolds School of Journalism. I’ve been working with their graduate program to develop OurTahoe.org as well as individual graduate student projects looking at the new ways "Web2.0" technologies can be used by journalists. Some of the projects resulted in Drupal modules like Promise. Others were developed outside of the Drupal framework with hooks into Drupal to save time prototyping a proof of concept demonstration like Notebook and Places or simply combined of existing Drupal modules with more traditional rich media production like Voices.

UNR’s Masters in Interactive Environmental Journalism is an intense 10 month program. That means for most of the summer, we don’t have a cohort of grad students contributing content to the site. Since OurTahoe.org had just launched in January and we had yet to develop a large user base, the plan was to spend the summer restructuring parts of the site and developing our own OurTahoe.org specific Drupal documentation for the next cohort of grad students.

On Sunday, June 24 fire broke out near the Angora Ridge in South Lake Tahoe. When it became obvious this fire was not going to be easily contained, several members of the graduate faculty expressed concern that we weren’t doing anything to cover the fire. The question became what type of coverage could we provide with the limited resources we had available?

The answer we came up with... Aggregation. We had been testing the different aggregation modules available and closely following Aron Novak's SoC work on improving Drupal's aggregation options. We opted to use Leech to pull custom feeds organized in Newgator using NetNewsWire or FeedDemon. We also used Thickbox to launch a slideshow of the best images Tahoe residents were uploading to Flickr.

Several times a day, the members of OurTahoe.org's staff who were available took turns sifting through hundreds of stories from the MSM and local Tahoe bloggers, adding the best stories to our Newsgator "clipping folders" which created the custom RSS feeds Leech sucked into Drupal. In some cases, I wrote scrapes of "breaking news" pages when an RSS feed wasn't available. We searched Flickr for interesting images. Marking those as favorites automagically added them to our slideshow.

It took a few hours to set up, but very little time to update throughout the day. The resulting coverage has been a great mix of MSM coverage as well as first person accounts from Tahoe residents in their own words.