A view inside the CR Gazette's awesome online flood coverage

Amid rising water, sandbags and calls to evacuate, the staff at the Cedar Rapids Gazette did a heroic job of bringing readers a stream of breaking news and multimedia in early June powered by generators and with floodwaters just a few feet away. Most impressive was the degree to which the paper responded to the call, answering readers' needs and their feedback on the fly and with a brand new editor at the helm. Reader resources continue in the paper's Floodlist community bulletin board and database.
**Update: New Gazette editor Steve Buttry chronicles his staff's efforts here. Take a minute to look at the comments from readers. Watch for the Gazette to emerge as the place to turn for Iowa news. And an independent media company to boot!**
Jason Kristufek, online operations manager for gazetteonline, kindly agreed to give a glimpse inside the newsroom and its outstanding coverage of their city in crisis:

Q: Describe the staff you had to pull from in developing your coverage.
Jason: Well the newsroom staff all pitched in and did whatever was needed. During the height of the disaster we had feature reporters coming in first thing in the morning asking, ‘What do you need done?’ which is just an awesome thing to see. Being the online editor, I was typically one of the first ones in the newsroom in the morning. We also had Jeff Raasch, a mobile journalist, in the building and getting a feel for what was happening right away. We basically pulled anyone who offered into reporting the story, even if it was just for an online story.

Also, for the first time that anyone can remember here, we pulled in an overnight crew to work hours were weren’t normally staffed. The community editor agreed to run the desk and online. We pulled in two sports reporters and a photographer, and it’s a good thing we did. During the overnight hours 1,200 volunteer sandbaggers helped save the last city water well and then help keep a hospital open long enough to get everyone out of their safely. Those two stories made that overnight coverage worth it and our coverage would not have been complete had we not been there.

Q: At what point did you know you needed to start building your flood coverage into a separate online package?
Jason: Prior to the beginning of the major flooding we had already built a special feature on the top of our homepage to make prominent the various photo galleries that were being produced. The traffic demanded the prominence. On Tuesday, June 10, the Cedar River began rising north of here and causing a lot of unexpected problems in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls areas. That was the morning when we decided to go all out and devote about 67 percent of the top of our homepage to the flood coverage. The traffic numbers and the fact that, no matter what, this was going to be a record flood demanded the change.

By Wednesday, June 11, we knew the water was going to get to 24 feet or about 12 feet above flood stage and about 5 feet over what the water was in 1993. We knew some places would be evacuated, but those are the normal flood areas. We knew that the bridges downtown were going to be closed for a day or two. For the most part we felt everything was going to be OK. The water would be high, but manageable.

Thursday morning, the 12th, everyone woke up to a tremendous downpour. At 3:15 a.m. I was awakened by a phone call from Metro Editor Mary Sharp saying a levee in one neighborhood had broken and evacuations were underway. Throughout the morning it kept raining and the water everywhere was only rising. Mobile Journalist Jeff Raasch kept calling in reports of boat rescues that were occurring and it was becoming clear that the situation was worsening by the hour.

As the day progressed, the magnitude of the flooding was becoming more clear. The evacuations, the warnings from the weather service and city and county officials were very real. And then photographer Liz Martin walked by my desk and opened her laptop and showed the photo that has now become the face of the flood in Cedar Rapids. That’s when it hit me. This photo, more than anything else, would tell people locally and around the world just how bad the situation was. So, I ran it the entire width of our homepage at the very top. That is probably when the layout of the page hit its peak.

Q: Did you hit any technological hurdles with the city underwater? How did you overcome them?
Jason: We ran into a few problems. At around 7 a.m. on Thursday, June 13, the power grid to downtown Cedar Rapids was shut off. The substation providing power was flooding and the staff there stayed as long as they could. Our facilities staff had already anticipated that. Within 20 minutes all three online workstations were powered up again using the building's backup emergency generator.

The other problems we continued to experience through the first several days were an extremely slow internet connection and spotty cell phone coverage. Uploading content took a few minutes extra each time.

With that said, we had water creeping up to within about 20 feet of our building. Technically, we were in the evacuation zone and twice the Iowa National Guard tried to get us to evacuate. Our IT staff was in the process of setting up work stations at our commercial print facility about eight miles away and our newsroom was making plans and packing up items in case we were forced to evacuate. Thankfully, that never happened.

Q: At one point you were geotagging stories and putting them on a couple of maps (one local and another more regional, if I remember correctly). What caused you to shift away from that delivery to the "Iowa Floods 2008" package that came later?
Jason: The maps came out of a meeting on Tuesday, June 10 with new editor Steve Buttry. It was his first day and I was first on his list at 7:30 a.m. By 10 a.m. we had a map online. The idea was to put up a map and plot areas that were being affected by the flood with links to stories and photos. Zack Kucharski, our information center manager, put the map together. We wanted to show the flooding from regional perspective.

As that day progressed it became clear that points on the map were getting lost in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City areas. So we decided to put three maps on the page to better show the regional aspect as well as the metropolitan areas of the two bigger cities where a majority of the information was coming from. So by early afternoon the three maps were online.

I decided late Wednesday evening, June 12, based on feedback in the newsroom and elsewhere that the maps were causing the homepage to load very slowly. We felt they still had value, but just not on the homepage. That’s when I decided to change the look a little bit on the frontpage to the “Flood of 2008” look that was shown during a majority of our coverage. Also, as the severity of the flooding become more real, the need for having a larger prominent image was important, I felt.

Q: Had you already put into place a plan for handling breaking stories, or were you working on the fly?
Jason: As far as having a template approach for display of a major breaking news event online, we were basically working on the fly. As far as a system for getting information into the newsroom quickly for immediate coverage, we had that part already covered.

Q: How well did your plan work? Please explain some of your thought processes as you designed the interface and retooled it.
Jason: The first decision that I made during the course of the flood coverage was to make as prominent as I could the photo galleries that were being produced by staff and from those submitted by the public. We had that early on; the traffic demanded it.

I knew I wanted to include some sort of map, since our coverage was regional and the regional aspect was pretty overwhelming. I was pushed by new editor Steve Buttry and so our early coverage was dictated by those.

Once the magnitude of what was happening locally was in full force, that is when the decision was made to change again. This included the huge photo at the top of the page. That decision was made because the image told the story better than any one headline or lines of text could, in my opinion. We kept that sort of look for about two days with a couple of other photos. We saw that people were still finding out stories and reading them, so it was not a deterrent.

Q: How did online relate to the newspaper during the flooding? How are they working together in the aftermath?
Jason: During this whole time period the entire staff did a great job of putting forth news quickly and immediately for online, which made some of their stories better in print for the next morning. Communication between print and online editors and reporters was constant. If anything, it made it so the print edition did not always have to lead with the hard news facts, which people already knew from the online stories.

There also was a good deal of cross-promotion going on. Obviously from an online perspective , we covered this story also from a multimedia angle. The videos, extra information, photos and other features were promoted in the print edition regularly.

As far as the aftermath, so far things are still progressing and we know the recovery is going to be a years-long process. We still have good, timely news and information up. We work together to provide complimentary information such as databases and so on.

Q: What were a couple of lessons you learned?
Jason: Based on the amount of feedback, we learned the value of very local, timely and relevant information online that is constantly updated. Time and again we heard comments from users about how they would always come back and find new and better information than they could find anywhere else. That is good feedback, because that was our goal.

We also learned that people really valued the breaking news text message alerts. We sent out about 22 during the main hours of the disaster. We relaxed our ‘policy’ some because the information warranted that kind of approach. But for locals who were out and about, it proved to be a valuable tool for them to stay informed of what was happening.

Another lesson we learned, is that people in our community saw the value of a local newspaper again.

Some other lessons we learned is that we need more reporters who are mobile and have the ability to file stories in the field through e-mail or whatever electronic system. We learned that giving every reporter a camera was a good thing.

What advice would you give other newsrooms who might want to have a contingency plan in case of big stories?
Jason: Ideally, it would be a good idea to have a major breaking news disaster template in place for your website. You can always adapt from there, but having a starting point would have been helpful.

Think outside the box. Be a resource for people. We found that our “random acts of kindness” forum and the “missing pets” databases had value to people that they couldn’t find anywhere else.

Have a plan for handling user generated content. The more hands-off you can be, the better. We spent an enormous amount of time on photos people submitted, which is good. But if you have an automated way to deal with them that would be better.

Experiment with ideas. The homepage changed a few times during the course of the disaster, which is OK. Listen to feedback and adapt.

Have someone in the newsroom who can do web development. It was so much easier to try and change and adapt the homepage, knowing that I could change things at any time.

Pace yourself. The hours are long, especially if you have a small staff. I didn’t want to leave this place, but you have take breaks not only for the physical aspect but the mental as well.

Batteries. I can’t say enough about having batteries and battery charges for all your equipment.