A concrete tool to help newsrooms cover emergencies
A new site to help newsrooms cover disasters is refreshing in its concrete practicality. Wouldn't it be great if these existed for every aspect of running a newsroom?
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Link: Emergency Mode for News, by OpenNews, NC Local, and Newspack
Emergency Mode is a set of resources, tools, and training that aims to prepare small newsrooms for various disasters. It’s a co-production between OpenNews, NC Local, and Newspack. They’ve done a great job. As their about page puts it:
“Emergency Mode for News equips local journalists and their newsrooms with the tools they need to respond to climate disasters. With a disaster reporting action pack, software and a learning community, Emergency Mode is designed to help journalists act nimbly and creatively to serve their communities when the unexpected happens.”
Toolkits include things like a practical checklist for newsrooms covering wildfires and a template for maintaining source lists during an emergency. There’s also a hands-on workshop series and tools like WordPress plugins for live rolling news updates and providing bandwidth-light versions of sites.
Most of all, I really appreciate the practical nature of all of it. Rather than hand-waving about principles and ideas, as many newsroom-facing resources do, everything here is a concrete tool that can actively be used in the field. Newsrooms are more squeezed than they’ve ever been, so it doesn’t hurt that it’s all free.
I’d love to see this level of concrete specificity for the normal working of a newsroom. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a list of business model checklists you could pull from? Or disaster recovery plans? Or data protection policies? Just as the tools on this site are going to be concretely useful to any newsroom that covers a disaster, checklists, tools, and training for standard operational practices could be really meaningful — particularly for smaller newsrooms that don’t have the ability to hire CTOs, CFOs, and so on.
In other words: more, please. This is lovely.
