No. 03 for April 2002
Anticipating Disaster
Do you have a disaster plan?
Of course you do. Any editor or publisher worth his or her salt has plans in place to get up and publishing should the newspaper’s main plant be damaged, destroyed or inaccessible.
But do you have a plan for covering disasters?
The question might seem a little strange: After all, a disaster is unplanned, sudden. Disaster coverage tends to bring out the best in us anyhow as the adrenaline kicks in and we go on journalistic auto pilot.
Yet if you want coverage beyond the ordinary, that’s the wrong way to do it. For instance, what if your environmental reporter isn’t around when that tanker overturns? Will those who are there instinctively know to call DHEC’s contact, or know the Coast Guard often gets involved when spills reach waterways?
If there is a plane crash, can you assume those FAA numbers, especially the ones for the local tower and operations center, will be handy? Will you know the fixed-base operators at your area’s airports? They can be a gold mine of information in a general aviation accident.
Will you have to fight your way through the busy signals as the public swamps the utility’s phones during a power outage, or will you have arranged a private contact in advance?
A little planning improves your chances of producing great stories – and of staying competitive in this 24-hour news world.
If you already have a plan, maybe now is the time to make sure it’s current. If not, it’s a good time to think about one. And I suggest keeping it in a loose leaf binder on the copy desk so it is central to everyone in the newsroom and easily updated.
Disasters are the wire services’ specialty, and in almost two decades as a correspondent and editor, I created plans for local bureaus. I developed others as a broadcast reporter and assignment editor. From that, here are some suggestions.
First, assume the worst will happen when your least-experienced staff is working, or when only one or two people are on duty. Start with some basic guidance:
· Outline who will be in charge until a senior editor arrives. You might make it the most senior person present, title or not. If not – if you think that person is needed for coverage – then a copy editor might be best. That quells confusion.
· Make clear the first thing is to verify what has happened. (Too many staffs have been sent on wild-goose chases because of a phone tip not immediately checked.)
· But also make clear that if it seems likely a disaster is happening (it can be difficult, after all, to get solid information from swamped emergency officials), it’s OK to immediately dispatch a reporter and photographer. More than once at the wire service we had the only reporter inside police lines because we got to the scene before officials closed it off.
Make any initial list of editors and executives to notify very brief. Don’t saddle your harried staff with running a phone tree, too. Let a senior editor handle that once he or she is notified while your staff moves on those first critical moments of coverage. When civil rights leader Vernon Jordan was shot and I got the tip, I had to call only my city editor at 4 a.m. to get things rolling. My job after that was to get moving on coverage.
Make sure you stress the need for graphics and materials to produce them. In the first harried hours we know to think photos, but we sometimes need a reminder about keeping alert for other graphics possibilities.
And remind those initially in charge to assign a responsibility to everyone in the office, from news clerk or receptionist to ace reporter. Someone needs to be delegated to handle phones; another needs to watch TV. Others may have to take dictation and handle sidebars. And someone has to have clear responsibility to write the main story.
Especially in small newsrooms, you need to make clear that at least one editor or reporter, and preferably at least two, should handle something other than disaster coverage. That’s often also your reserve to relieve overtired staff the next day.
This reassures those in charge at a time when everyone wants a piece of the action that it’s OK to assign some less-glamorous duties. And if you stress that these things are just as important to keep a newsroom running in an emergency, you are less likely to see conflicts later.
It also is useful to have a paragraph pointing out that death tolls early in a disaster or major emergency are shaky at best and often widely divergent from different sources. Their early use should be given careful thought and attributed in every case they are used. And remind everyone that what you don’t know – how many were on board the plane, for instance – can be as important as what you do know.
Next month, we’ll look at some specifics to consider when assembling phone lists for various types of disasters or emergencies.
Doug Fisher teaches editing and reporting at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at dfisher@sc.edu or 803-777-3315.