Full Circle Associates

Hm, and I thought I wasn't going to blog tonight. HA!

This article reinforces the thread of many of my posts since Katrina hit. Ground up connection of people with needs, stories, information can be a powerful response to disasters. My friend Gabriel Shirley said to me yesterday, the sweet spot here is finding how to hold both top down centralized responses AND bottom up distributed responses. And hold the space for them in a way that is very flexible, nimble but with enough connections to faciltiate communication and avoid gaps and too much redundancy. I suspect that some redundancy is really good. Anyway, this article on OJR takes a look at NOLA.com's discussion boards just after Katrina. NOLA.com blogs and forums help save lives after Katrina

"As the water finally starts to recede in New Orleans, the watershed for online journalism has been laid bare. Hurricane Katrina brought forth a mature, multi-layered online response that built on the sense of community after 9/11, the amateur video of the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster and July 7 London bombings, and the on-the-scene blogging of the Iraq War...

NOLA.com is known more for its MardiGras.com site and its live webcam, but now has become Exhibit A in the importance of the Internet for newspaper companies during a disaster. When the newspaper couldn't possibly be printed or distributed, the NOLA.com news blog became the source for news on hurricane damage and recovery efforts -- including updates from various reporters on the ground and even full columns and news stories.

The blog actually became the paper, and it had to, because the newspaper's readership was in diaspora, spread around the country in shelters and homes of families and friends. The newspaper staff was transformed into citizen journalists, with arts reviewers doing disaster coverage and personal stories running alongside hard-hitting journalism. In a time of tragedy and loss, the raw guts of a news organization were exposed for us to see."

katrina, hurricanekatrina, recovery2