There is an article on the Poynter Institute's web site, with several local TV news directors, which makes for interesting reading about how they covered the flooding in Nashville.
There have been a lot of thoughts on media and the flooding. There's this interesting blog from Lovell Communications. And this bit from the Everyday PR blog written by Susan Hart of Hart Public Relations.
Other media firms took a different approach to "covering" the flood. Atkinson Public Relations wrote this post in their Flack Seeds blog.
And others took a more inspirational approach. An example is Trey Campbell's guest blog, which I read on the Everyday PR site. Trey is the director of communications for the Southwestern Company, and is the president of the Nashville Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
I will remember the flood of 2010 for many reasons, but if I may brag a little, there is one more reason.
In the tiny town of Lafayette, near the Kentucky border, a small weekly newspaper, whose newsroom has an average age of 23, was called upon to serve the community that, like so many others, was hard hit. And answer the call they did.
During the worst of the storm and immediate aftermath, which for Lafayette was mostly Sunday and Monday, the team posted two dozen stories and even more photos. As things calmed down, the stories did not. They ran stories in print. They ran stories online - as I write this, we're at nearly 40 stories and growing - and dozens upon dozens of photos.
They continue to publish pertinent local information.
I would note that people looked to their hometown paper for information, too. Analytics revealed that in the two-day period of Sunday/Monday, the web site's traffic increased over 10 times the norm.
While the focus, and rightly so, was on Nashville, there were young journalists working hard to provide their hometowns with hyper-local information. And it wasn't just in Lafayette. I noticed quite a few small town newspapers working hard to provide hyper-local content to their beleaguered readers.
What is most interesting is the information gathering they used. Yes, we had folks on the street pulling together art, information and stories. But we utilized our Facebook page as well to call upon readers and viewers to send us anecdotes, details of hyper-localized flooding, and photos. And the public came through.
To me it was an impressive and successful effort on the part of a very young newsroom that had never experienced such an event. Their performance was splendid, and I am proud to be their publisher.
