Online Audience - 2006 Annual Report

It is no longer a secret that disasters push people online in droves. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 and the London bombings of July 2005 showed a flurry of online activity with citizen-produced content in the foreground. Blogs of eye-witness accounts, digital photography and amateur video delivered unedited reporting and reactions from the scene. When Katrina leveled the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, the Web was ready to deliver once more. What was different this time — with little citizen-produced content coming out of stricken Louisiana and Mississippi — was that mainstream media took the lead. Newspapers and television stations from New Orleans to Biloxi started blogs to provide constant updates from the field.

Some American news organizations also allowed bloggers to create blog posts on their sites or link to the sites of bloggers who were reporting from their communities. This practice followed the lead of the BBC, which did the same things for bloggers and vloggers during its coverage of the tsunami and the bombings in London.

Recognizing huge interest in the Katrina story, broadcast outlets packed their archives with storm footage. The Monday after the storm made landfall, visitors to CNN.com downloaded more than 9 million video clips. A week later the total figure had climbed to more than 35 million. MSNBC.com did even better with a record-setting 50 million clips streamed in a week.68 And WWL Channel 4, the only local outlet to stay on the air, provided a live Webcast of its coverage.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune emerged as a poster organization for its use of the Internet. The paper was forced to cease publishing its print version after the storm and moved to the Web, where it published an online edition for a couple of days. In addition to the staff-updated blogs and photo archives, nola.com provided neighborhood forums to allow evacuees and their families to connect and share information about loved ones and their neighborhoods. The August traffic on nola.com jumped by 277% compared to July.

The online pundit Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine.com, wrote in a column in the Guardian: “Trust me: before Katrina, this is not how American newspaper editors talked about the Web and Weblogs. But after Katrina, they will.”

Other large media organizations seized the power of the Web to document the magnitude of the storm — the New York Times produced detailed interactive graphics, while the Washington Post carried NASA simulations showing New Orleans under water. Interest in the storm was so high that even the Weather Channel site registered record numbers of visitors.

In the immediate aftermath, citizen-created journalism would also establish a presence. New media mainstays such as blogs, the user-produced encyclopedia Wikipedia, and even the online classifieds giant craigslist were again up to the challenge. Based on an earlier experiment undertaken during the tsunami, Wikipedia created a Katrina portal that was a clearinghouse for news and relief information. Craigslist created special classifieds categories: temporary housing, volunteer listings and lost and found. The Yahoo-owned photo service Flickr allowed users to sort through thousands of images by looking for "tags," or key words associated with the photographs. As of November 2005, more than 15,000 photos were tagged “hurricaneKatrina.”69

Non-media blogs, such as Metroblogging New Orleans, abounded, providing everything from accounts of the storm to commentary on the news to criticism of the relief effort. Blog-tracker Web sites like Technorati, which indexed nearly 27 million sites as of January 2005, offered separate listings of Katrina-themed postings.

The reporting challenges brought by the winds and surging water showed that the dinosaur the online world calls MSM can navigate the digital realm and even set the standard. After the rise of blogs in 2004, citizen-produced content was expected by some to dominate 2005. What happened instead was that mainstream news organizations caught up and blended old-fashioned reporting with new technology. And when they did, as in the case of Katrina, they came out on top.