When will we ever learn from our mistakes?

I felt like my brain was about to explode watching the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing last week. I was enthralled with the story, but the reporting and coverage of it just hurt.

It wasn’t just the misinformation spread by more than one news organization and journalist. It was how trained journalists pursued the story. Did everyone forget Journalism 101 while covering the story?

It also makes me wonder if we as journalists have learned anything because I feel like I’ve been repeating the points I’m about to make for quite some time, including after the Newtown shooting.

To tweet or not to tweet the scanner

Never have I seen so many people listening to (and tweeting) the scanner for a police operation.

I’m a big fan of the police scanner. If I’m covering something at the scene, the scanner helps me understand what I’m seeing better. But I also have been around enough cops and firefighters to understand the lingo and the codes you’re going to hear on the scanner.

I also know that it’s the heat of the moment and there are going to be things on the scanner that are exaggerations. Some things also are flat out wrong. It’s why you don’t report from the scanner from an active scene and confirm things.

We have a service in New Jersey called the BNN where people send messages of what they’re hearing on the BNN. I cannot count on two hands the number of alerts have turned out to be exaggerations or flat out nothing.

Should you live tweet the scanner? Of course not. A million times no! Especially if you are not at the scene and cannot see what is happening. I always thought of the scanner as something that gives me leads and supplements what I see with my own eyes. But we need to remember that it’s investigation in process, which means things discussed could turn out to be false.

Misinformation travels at a million miles per hour

Tweeting from the scanner means that misinformation was out there, including the names of suspects who were not really suspects at all. It’s all over Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and everywhere in between. That share and retweet button is pretty easy to use, but it doesn’t take long to think before you hit it.

Ask yourself who this person is who is posting information and how much you trust them. Are they sourcing their information? Because there was lots of information without clear sources throughout the week.

The Atlantic has an excellent article about the anatomy of one of these misinformation disasters from the week.

If your mother says she loves you…

Too often I saw posts on Twitter attributed to Reddit or as crowdsourced. That’s fine. I’m a big fan of Reddit and of crowdsourcing and both have helped me as a journalist and as a social media producer.

But what happened to confirming those sources? They’re not official police sources. They’re just random people and we don’t know their background. In some cases we don’t even know who the people are because of the anonymity of the Internet.

If I had a photo from someone that says it’s of a suspect, I’d want to confirm with an actual investigator or official. I’d want someone I trust to tell me it’s true. It seems some sources were not doing that, and that just helped create more misinformation and some news organizations to be just wrong.

So we’re wrong, now what

Of course people are going to be wrong at some point. Even Woodward and Bernstein were wrong at least once. I’ve been wrong. There can be miscommunication between us and our sources. Our sources just have the wrong information or it changes between when we talk to them and the story is published. It happens, though the severity of it the last week was at a pretty bad level.

How journalists react to being wrong, to me, is important. Do we say “our bad” or do we “stand by our story”? I think it says more to admit you were wrong than to defend your stories and reporting when you know it was bad. We’re human and make mistakes. Own up to them and it will earn you more credit with the public.

That doesn’t mean anyone should make a habit of being wrong. Just own up to your mistakes.

Will we ever learn?

It seems after big news stories like the Marathon bombing, we’re dissecting what went wrong and how we can do better. But then lots of people fall into the same habits and we repeat mistakes.

I had an editor at The Hour who once told us that the public trust is like virginity. Once you lose it, you can never get it back.

If we keep making the same mistakes, we’re going to lose the public’s trust. What are we as journalists and as an industry if we don’t have the public’s trust?

Related articles

• Crowdsourced manhunt shows promise, problems (usatoday.com)
• Breaking News Is Broken (slate.com)
• When Following Breaking News, Why it Helps to Think Like a Journalist (pbs.org)

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Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

Today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and several years ago my colleague at the Herald News Heather Appel and I worked together on a package about his visit to Paterson days before he died. The package was for the 40th anniversary of King’s death and included Heather’s story on his visit and a video I shot and edited with one of the people influential in bringing King to Paterson. It was a rewarding experience getting to meet and listen to one of the people who helped bring King to Paterson. It’s living history to me.

After I left my position at the Herald News, though, there were lots of website changes. I thought my video was lost forever. I didn’t burn a copy of it for myself (I still kick myself). Today, though, Heather posted the YouTube version of the video on Facebook. I was amazed to see the video was still out there.

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More on fixing local news

John Robinson wrote a response today about the responses to his original post about fixing local news. I came across the original post via Steve Buttry’s post and wrote my own response about listening to the community.

And John’s post also talks about listening to the community.

Talk with people in the community. They’re the ones who you are trying to serve. Don’t survey them. We have enough surveys. Talk to them about what they need and how you can serve them. When was the last time you — a newsroom journalist — asked someone what you could do for them? Not a source. Not a relative. But a regular person who might or might not bother to read your prose. If you haven’t, how will you know if what you’re doing is what is helping them?

Make sure you read his entire post. It’s a good read.

Perhaps 2013 for journalists, especially those on the local beat, is the year we devote to listening.

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How to change local news? Listen to your community

I read Steve Buttry’s blog post today on what beats local news should cover with great interest, mainly since local news has always been my biggest passion. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about local news is because I find it to be the best way in journalism to help people, something I’ve always worked to do. And you’re not going to help people unless you listen to them and what their important issues are.

It pains me to see that so many local journalists don’t really listen to what their communities want, what issues are most important to them. Certainly there are things that we should always cover, but, as Steve points out, perhaps we should rethink how we do it.

But listening to your community isn’t just about talking to your sources or even talking to people at meetings. The people who are at those meetings have agendas and I’ve always believed to never fully trust a politician, even a local politician. They have to earn your trust, but at the same time you always need to check out what they’re saying.

Listening to your community is meaning you need to be in the community, talking to people. Go where those people are. Let them know where you are. But also eavesdrop, something we all need to be good at in journalism. Read comments on articles, and really read them. Don’t be dismissive of questions or comments and be open-minded. Be involved by asking your own questions of your audience and people in the community. Ask them about what’s the biggest issues on their mind, what they’re most curious about. Use social media, monitoring what people are saying in the community that way too.

And walk around. Always walk around. You see so much more walking around a community than you do driving through it. You’re not going to see much if you parachute into a community, as so many do (and I admit I have done in the past too). I used to be accused of being handed stories in Westport and Millburn-Short Hills, but I never was. I observed a lot and then asked questions. I’m thankful I always received answers rather than “I can’t talk about that.”

But never be dismissive, especially if you think something is “boring.” Traffic issues, including pedestrian problems, have always been a problem in every community I’ve covered. But who wants to write about crosswalks and speed humps and stop signs? But it’s what people care about because it affects their every day life. Think outside the box in how to cover it, too. One of my favorite projects I ever did was a video on what it was like to drive over a speed hump in Millburn-Short Hills. Everyone talked about speed humps both positively and negatively, but it’s another thing to show people what the experience is like.

If one thing is universal in journalism is that everyone hates to cover planning and zoning. Who wants to sit through those meetings? But development issues always are of major interest to people. It’s how their neighborhoods are changing and therefore their lives. It’s beyond NIMBY, and it’s certainly beyond covering those planning and zoning meetings. Knowing how to read an application and break it down and explain it to people is a great skill. I actually always have been interested in covering these issues because I know how important they are, even if it could be boring. Plus covering it enough means you can spot trends — like people designating their homes as “historic” to curb the mcmansion trend, which is something I wrote about in Westport.

As far as meeting coverage, which Steve addresses in his post, I do think you can’t completely escape it. Something always happens at a meeting, and you can’t make up for it if you miss it. I skipped a Board of Finance meeting back in Westport because there was nothing of note on the agenda. Instead, the board decided to discuss school funding matters after the meeting had been adjourned. In other words, no one from me to school officials to parents knew this was happening, which was its own drama in its own right because it violated freedom of information.

There are lots of ways to cover meetings other than your straight stenographer process and giving us the score. What are the issues beyond the meeting? How does the meeting work? Why should people care enough to go to those meetings? Who is at those meetings constantly and why are they there? Is the meeting process broken and how can it be fixed?

I could write so much more about how to better cover local news as someone who has both done it (and I like to say quite successfully — my sites have always been called “the gold standard”) and as someone who consumes it (frustratingly so, since I never know what’s happening in my city). But the key here is to listen. It’s good to have a plan on what to cover, but it’s also good to be flexible and change your plans based on what you see and hear.

Quick update: I realized after I hit publish that there are many news organizations that have established community newsrooms in a variety of forms. I want to applaud those efforts because those kinds of things will help any journalist understand how best to serve their community.

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Changes in news coverage, introduction of social media and the NHL lockout

Before I write the rest of this post I have to say I am a hockey fan and I want the NHL lockout to end. I want to watch top-level hockey sooner rather than later.

But this post is about the power of social media and how it has changed the world, especially in sports and its coverage. The lockout is a prime example to show how things have changed.

I’ve been through three lockouts as a fan — the one that erased half of the 1994-95 season, the one that canceled the 2004-05 season and the current lockout. The 2004 lockout doesn’t seem that long ago, but in the world of journalism and social media it was.

I was still a reporter at a daily newspaper that barely had a website in 2004. Facebook was around, but I didn’t have an account. You still needed a school e-mail address to be part of Facebook then. MySpace was the rage. Never mind Twitter. News could be covered on a 24-7, but it was more for the top national brands and cable news networks.

In other words: We didn’t have the access to news quite that we have today.

So the news of the lockout came slower than it does today. There was no one live tweeting a press conference with the NHL or NHLPA. There weren’t people posting constant observations from outside the negotiating rooms.

I went to a lot of AHL games back then, but that’s how you knew what was happening with the team’s prospects. Fans didn’t have the access quite like they do today to the information and news about those teams. You had to rely on what people who went to games thought, and many times you were relying on people who weren’t watching hockey for a living.

Of course fans came back after the lockout. We didn’t have reason to be angry about things that were said or done because we didn’t have the access to what was being said like we do now. There was no social media campaign by the players or owners to make the other side look evil.

Fast forward to today. Now fans have unbelievable access to news, information and even people because of social media and the way news is published. Video of games and players is everywhere and quickly. We know what is being said by the commissioner and the head of the players union as soon as they’re saying it, even if we’re not next to a TV carrying Canadian sports channels. Someone tweets what’s being said and that’s retweeted and then retweeted again and again. On top of that players are on social media expressing their feelings about the lockout and, in some cases, engaging with fans about the lockout.

It shouldn’t be a shock the level of frustration and anger from anyone who loves the NHL is much higher than it was in 2004-05. Social media connects fans. They have started protests and expressed their anger. People frequently will respond to the NHL’s Twitter and Facebook account about the lockout, saying they need to fix it now. And with the number of fan blogs today, there are plenty of places for fans to express their opinions on the lockout.

The result? A study found the damage to the NHL’s brand because of the lockout is at an alarming level. From the article:

A disastrous map would be the one Level5 created following the BP PLC oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It was the worst the company had seen – until it got around to the NHL this month.

But I wonder if the NHL and the NHLPA is listening or even realizing how the world has changed in the years since the last lockout. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, the owners, NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr and the players are taking a gamble on the fans returning. ”We recovered last time because we have the world’s greatest fans,” Bettman said last summer.

But that gamble is a losing bet. It’s always been a losing bet. It’s worse than spending $50 on Megamillions tickets expecting to win. All they had to do is look at the reaction on social media and compare the climate from 2004-05 and today. But it appears all involved had, and still have, their heads in the sand, not listening to the fans (aka the customers) and even the experts who say the lockout is killing the brand.

I can’t say I won’t be back as a fan. I know I will be even as I’m frustrated and angry with the current situation. One friend professed to me the other day he’d immediately buy tickets. But there are plenty of other people I know, passionate fans, who are angry or are disinterested. It’s going to be a hard sell to get them back and it’s going to be an even harder sell to get back the fans the league has gained in the last couple years.It’s not unreasonable to think the NHL will go from record highs in attendance and revenues to record lows. It could hurt some teams significantly, some of the same teams who are endorsing the lockout.It’s easy to say the lockout ending and saving some of the season would fix some of the damage, but I don’t know how much it would help now. So much damage has been done.The lesson here for everyone — whether you’re in journalism or you’re a brand — is that you cannot ignore the outside world. You have to adapt to changing technologies and news cycles. If you don’t, you are doomed to failure.

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Thoughts on Newtown shooting coverage: Misinformation, media oversaturation and naming the killer

I’ve needed a few days to digest the coverage of the shootings in Connecticut for assorted reasons (among them is I grew up 20 minutes from Newtown and I needed some time). But looking back, I think there are some lessons we all need to learn and other things that need to be discussed.

The spread of misinformation

It would take a lot of space to list all the piece of misinformation that spread far too quickly during Friday’s coverage. There were reports the father of the shooter was dead in New Jersey (he’s alive and in Connecticut) to how his mother was a teacher at the school (she was not and was killed at home). I’m still trying to understand how some of this information was reported as fact.

One of the biggest mistakes was the release of the name of the killer as Ryan Lanza, who lives in New Jersey. We knew fairly quickly it wasn’t him because of the Jersey Journal’s connections (and we were led to believe early it was his brother too). Ryan Lanza was alive and wasn’t a part of the shooting, and he was posting it wasn’t him on Facebook.

The Associated Press reported Ryan Lanza as the killer, even after other news organizations reported it was his brother. An anonymous law enforcement agent told the AP he had mixed up the names of the brothers later, which leads to an argument to be made about anonymous sources (I have been asking how national news outlets with no ties to the area have reliable anonymous sources to quote).

Meanwhile, reporters were digging through the Internet looking for every tidbit they could on Ryan Lanza, sharing his Facebook page and videos. The problem was no one was sure it was him. A Slate post asked if Ryan Lanza’s Facebook page was him, and they later had to write why they rushed to say why they searched through social media for the brothers.

It feels like to me, though, there was a lot of half reporting happening as the story developed. People were playing detective and not journalist in some ways too. Yes, we need to report what we know, but we need to be sure what we know is true.

I often tell reporters and editors that they don’t stop being journalists because it’s social media. They need to report things thoroughly and ask lots of questions. They need to confirm things before they write about them as fact.

Everyone wants to rush to be first rather than being right in today’s 24-7 news cycle (even though several studies show no one ever remembers who broke the story nor do they care). It’s easy to point fingers in hindsight, but it’s a lesson that everyone needs to take a breath before hitting post and making sure everything is right and complete.

But there’s lots of blaming of Twitter and social media in general for the rush and the failure to get things right. I refuse to accept that as an excuse. Don’t blame the platform for poor reporting. We all have a duty to get it right and get it right the first time, especially on stories like this.

Everyone needs to take a breath and think before they hit post, no matter the story.

The media crush

I drove through Newtown on Saturday. I wasn’t there because of curiosity; I was there because I was driving through to get to dinner with my friends in Danbury. But in my efforts to get to the highway, I got to see the media crush first hand.

On one side of the road was the church where there was a vigil being held. There was a giant sign that said “no press.” On the other side of the road, though, was a large group of media with cameras and their satellite trucks. It was surreal enough to see “home” on national television, but it was even more surreal to see all those people first hand.

And then I read Debbie Galant’s post for the NJ News Commons where she advocates for more combined forces for large news stories like this one. It’s an interesting concept.

First off, isn’t this why wire services exist in the first place? So the local coverage by one news organization can be spread to those who cannot be there. Plus wouldn’t you rather hear or see what the local news is doing with the story than a giant national outlet? They’re more likely to know the people and players in the story.

But how does it work? That’s a debate I’m sure we’ll all have to have if we wanted to calm the crush on a small town like this.

Naming the killer

After mass shootings there seems to be a debate on if the media should be naming the killer. It happened after the Aurora movie theater shooting and it happened again after Friday’s events. Steve Buttry had a blog post about the issue.

I disagree with doing it for a lot of reasons, but I also need to state my bias here. I suffer from depression and think the country needs to be discussing mental health on a larger scale.

That being said, I disagree with Steve and others about omitting the who from the story. It’s just as much an important part of the story as anything else. People are going to want to know why, and we should be reporting and trying to tell them why, and you can’t do that without reporting about the killer. Reporting about the Virginia Tech massacre and the killer there led to uncovering the holes in the system that left him untreated for mental illness. These are the kinds of issues journalists need to be uncovering, especially as people are reeling from the number of incidents this year.

You also have to determine where the line is drawn. Do we not report the name of anyone who is charged with murder? What crimes is it OK to report a name and not OK to do it?

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Social media became a lifeline during Hurricane Sandy

It feels like a lifetime ago when Hurricane Sandy was rushing toward New Jersey, especially since life became incredibly busy in the days that followed. We all were working long hours from our newspaper partners’ reporters and editors to my boss who slept in his office to a coworker who worked from a shelter in Hoboken.

But what I learned also is social media, especially Twitter, became a lifeline for so many people before, during and after Hurricane Sandy, especially after the power was out for so many people. There may still be a few people without power in New Jersey.

If people had questions, they came to us on Twitter. “Can you tell me what’s open?” “Where can I find open gas stations?” “Where can I volunteer?” “Do you know when my power will come back on?” “What does it look like in Seaside?”

I spent hours answering questions where I could. The night Gov. Chris Christie introduced gas rationing, I spent two hours answering questions because people were confused. We pointed people to photo galleries of places down the Shore when they asked what things were like there. It was frustrating to tell people “I don’t know specifics” about the power being restored, but I tried to direct them places to get the information, including on our site.

But often there was no way I knew all of the answers. This is when crowdsourcing and hashtagging became important to us. When people asked us where they could help and donate, we would direct them to the general volunteer hotline and the charities on the ground. But we also retweeted those questions so if there were other, local efforts people could be in touch with the people who wanted to help.

But people more often wanted to know where they could find open businesses that had heat, charging stations, Internet access, hot meals and supplies like water and ice. Quickly people wanted to know where open gas stations were so they could fill their generator tanks. Many stations were without power.

We answered this task by creating hashtags — #njopen was for businesses that were open and #njgas was for gas station reports. In fact, #njopen came at the suggestion of a follower. Both took off quickly to the point lots of other news agencies, businesses and even the government agencies were using the hashtags.

But we didn’t just let the information stay on social media. We integrated it where we could onto the website with Twitter widgets. Gas stories had a #njgas widget at the bottom of it. We had standing articles with the widgets so people could find the information if they weren’t on Twitter. It was something we also did after Hurricane Irene when lots of roads were closed and blocked. We created and embedded widgets with our standing #njcommute hashtag.

One of the biggest lessons from Hurricane Sandy is to listen to your followers. If you’re just pushing links, you’re not going to see their news reports, their questions and the information they share. If you listen to them, you can make sure you’re sharing the right information with them. Our followers wanted information gas and power outages, and I knew that based on the questions we received. Whenever we had updates, they immediately went onto our social media accounts (with many retweets and clicks to follow). Plus listening to questions and comments helped us determine what hashtags we needed to create and lead.

Listening to your followers, though, is a good practice even when there isn’t a major disaster. If you listen to the questions and reaction (in addition to looking at the retweets and clicks), you know what information your followers want most.

The work we did during Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath was some of the most fulfilling I’ve done in social media. It’s not often you hear thank you or get told you’re doing a great job, but we heard it at least once per day. People told us without the work we were doing on social media and on NJ.com they’d be lost. To know we helped in some small way for people makes all of the work worth it.

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New York Post’s front page photo provokes questions and discussion

Should the New York Post have ran on its front page the photo of a man moments before his tragic death when he was pushed in front of a subway? Should it have run the photo at all?

Those are two questions several of my friends and peers are discussing on social media today, no matter if they’re in journalism or not. But the bigger question is: Why didn’t anyone help the man? The Atlantic Wire raises the question today too. The Atlantic also reviews the details of why the Post’s freelance photographer didn’t actually help the man (instead he was using his flash to try to signal the subway).

To quote several people: This story is a media ethics professor’s dream.

Journalists don’t want to be part of the story, but where do we draw the line? When is it O.K. to get involved? Clearly when someone’s life is on the line is a point when any human should decide to get involved. But do you snap the photo first and then help or help and then snap the photo? I think that’s a judgment call in how dangerous and imperative the situation is.

I was put in a situation where I had to get involved in a story a few years ago. A man who appeared to be drunk was driving through the middle of town and crashed into a car. I was the one who called 911 in the gathering crowd. The police later said he had hit a sign and other cars in the area. How did I resolve the issues that I was now part of the story? I told a co-worker what I saw and he got the information from the police.

But there are bigger issues with this story than journalists’ integrity or if the photo should run. Why aren’t people helping in general when incidents like this happen?

The subway story reminded me of an incident in the Washington Metro more than a year ago. A man was beaten by a group of teens and it was captured on video. Of course the video ended up on YouTube. But no one in the area, including those videoing the incident, did anything to help. No one stepped in to stop the beating (though I don’t blame people for not wanting to do that). But why didn’t anyone hit the big security buttons that are all over Metro stations? Why didn’t someone run to the station manager to get help?

But it’s not like it’s an isolated incident. There are other times when you see video and photos of beatings and fights happening at sporting events. There was a beating after the 2012 Winter Classic in Philadelphia that made its way onto YouTube, which sparked a police investigation. And in any of those incidents you don’t see anyone helping or trying to get security or police.

Are people more concerned about take a photo or video of something rather than trying to help people? Is this a new level of the bystander syndrome where people don’t want to get involved in an incident? It’s a somewhat disturbing trend.

Updates:

There’s some interesting follow-up reading on he Post’s photo and the choice to publish it as it was. Gawker caught up with some photographers — including Pulitzer Prize winners — on what they would have done in the same situation. As an aside: I don’t think anyone is blaming R. Umar Abbasi for Ki Suk Han’s death. I think people don’t understand why he didn’t try to help Han more than he did.

The Society of Professional Journalists ethics committee chairman also weighed in on the debate in an enlightening interview. He raises issues I hadn’t thought about. His comments made me think differently about the photo.

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Feeling uninspired

The activity on this blog is an indication of how I’m feeling in the last two months or so: Uninspired.

Yesterday’s post was the first one I had written since before Hurricane Sandy at the end of October, and the same has been happening with my creative life in general. I’m not writing much if at all, whether it’s on this blog or elsewhere. I started a post-Sandy piece on how social media worked for us, but I haven’t been able to get back to it. I’m not taking many photos if at all lately. I’m not even debating much about journalism and social media, though I am determined to read Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present. I haven’t even been reading that much lately.

I was busy in the wake of Sandy, but I also just don’t feel like I have the energy or inspiration to dive into my creative projects now that things have calmed down.

I can point to my depression problems as one of the reasons. But my creative projects whether it’s photography, writing on a blog or scribbling in a journal has been one of my coping mechanisms.

And it’s not like I don’t have ideas. I’ve had a story idea brewing in my mind for a few weeks, but I’ve just never gotten to the point of putting the words on the page. I haven’t had a driving desire to sit down and write them down. I’ve shot photos, but I have yet to edit them. Editing them leads to sharing them, which is the fulfilling part of shooting photos.

I’ve had times in my life where I’ve felt uninspired, but it’s usually in one area and not all of my creative life. I was writing a story yesterday at work and struggled to write a creative lede. I wrote something straight forward, which is a bit more unusual for me. Lede writing can be a joy and I’ve rarely had that problem.

So where do I go from here? I have to find my inner inspiration (hey, I can’t sit around waiting for it to strike, right?), but it can be a hard task when you’ve lost something like that.

I’d love to hear stories from people who have gone through this struggle. Or maybe you have suggestions? Either way, leave them in the comments section or send me a tweet at @jenconnic.

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Being prepared for weather events on social media

There are two things I know will always do well on local news sites and on social media — traffic issues and weather events. Many times the two will cross into one giant issue for your social media followers.

But when a giant weather event like a hurricane is coming, you better be extra prepared on social media. I took my experiences from Hurricane Irene last year in creating plans for Hurricane Sandy this year and also know what to expect: A massive following of people hanging on our every tweet and Facebook post.

What can you expect and how should you prepare? Here’s some suggestions.

Expect questions and lots of them

Before, during and after Hurricane Irene, it was hard to keep up with Twitter. New Jersey was hit hard with flooding, especially along the major rivers, and thousands of people were without power for a significant chunk of time. Twitter was the best way for people to access the news we were posting and also to seek out answers. They didn’t have power, but they still had a cell phone charged.

This really can be a make or break moment for your engagement on social media, especially Twitter. If people ask questions, they want a response, especially in an emergency situation.

I tried to answer as many questions as I could, many times had to seek more information from the follower to be able to fully answer their questions. If it was a question I felt many could benefit from, I retweeted with the response.

But what if you don’t know the answer? That’s when I turned to the crowd. If I felt followers could help provide an answer (ie. local places to donate items, local places that have power, etc.), I would retweet and ask everyone to help.

And don’t forget about Facebook. Pay attention to the comments and your wall and try to provide answers there when needed. If you’re answering a question on your post to a user, tag them so they see the answer.

You’ll get lots of news tips and photos

During major storm events, every one of your followers on social media can become a neighborhood reporter and they will. They’ll tell you about downed trees and if they’re without power. And more often than not, they will share photos of damages and problems in their neighborhood. It was hard to keep up with the number of photos people were sharing with us in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Irene.

With news tips, you can retweet things people are sharing from their neighborhoods. Reporters cannot be in every corner of your coverage area, so this is helpful. If the tip is incredibly useful or newsworthy, it would be helpful to share the information with reporters and editors.

But also be careful about the information people are sharing. Some people share misinformation. It’s one thing to share “I’m without power” than “the emergency shelter is without power.” The latter should be confirmed before you share it and rises to another level of newsworthiness.

Likewise with photos, retweet the best photos from your followers. And then ask for permission to use those photos on your site. Create a gallery of the photos your social media followers are sending you. Photo galleries of user submitted photos for a major weather event will perform well.

But always remember to ask permission before you take any photos that your followers share with you.

This is also a time when Storify is a powerful tool to help you cultivate all of the information and photos people are sharing with you and beyond. You also can share YouTube videos people may post and more via a Storify you embed on your website.

Be aware of hashtagging

It’s important to know the general hashtagging for a storm. #Sandy was trending on Friday and continues to today.

But that hashtag isn’t going to give people all of their local news. It’s going to bring me news from other states affected by the storm. It’s a good idea to consider a local hashtag to point people to the best place to get their local news about the storm. We used #njirene during Hurricane Irene and are using #njsandy for Hurricane Sandy.

Yes, other news organizations will latch onto the local hashtag, but is that really a bad thing?

Plus having a local hashtag means you can embed a Twitter widget on your site with the best local tweets about the storm.

Photos are the thing on Facebook

People are going to share the news they can use leading up to the storm including a FAQ about the storm and a guide about the storm. During and after the storm they’ll want to know about flooding and power outages. They’ll also want to know about their commuting.

But they’ll also want to see photos of the storm, something they’re more likely to share with their friends on Facebook.

So post photos with links to your important stories on Facebook. They’re more likely to be shared and to be seen by people, which is extra important when you want to get important information out about the storm.

What other tips would you share to help with storm coverage on social media? Post them in the comments below.

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