Let's do for news what we did for software
October 7th, 2006 by Doc Searls
There have always been problems with distributing urgent public safety information. These problems show up, over and over, with every hurricane, tornado, flood and wildfire. At this moment in history, problems fall in three areas of responsibility (and, for that matter, responsiveness):
- The old official channels (radio, TV, newspapers) are scaling back on live news coverage (or on news coverage, period)
- The new official channels (web sites and services, "reverse 911") are still, as we've been saying since 1995, "under construction".
- The new unofficial channels (cell phones, blogs, RSS feeds, phone trees) are still no substitute for the Real Thing, whatever it will become.
Lately I've been thinking about some simple hacks we can do in #3 that will give some needed assistance to #s 1 and 2 as well.
What got me thinking was the Day Fire, which lasted almost a month. What began as a trash fire ended as the 5th largest wildfire in California history. By the time it was contained early this week, the Day Fire covered 162,702 acres , or about 250 square miles — a total that exceeds the dimensions of Chicago. In the middle of its last week, the Day Fire was fought by nearly five thousand people, armed with 226 engines, 45 'dozers, 41 water tenders, 28 helicopters, 9 helitankers and more than 10 air tankers. Its cost so far have exceeded $70 million. As of yesterday (October 6), 831 personnel remain assigned to the fire. (Although it's contained, the fire is not yet out.)
Yet news coverage of the Day Fire was notably minimal — even as rivers of dark smoke flowed over the heads of millions, and ash fell like snow. Why?
One reason was geography. The Day Fire burned across the Sespe Wilderness and the southern districts of the Los Padres National Forest, which together comprise one of the largest roadless regions in the continental U.S. — even though it's under the northwest approach path to Los Angeles International Airport.
Another reason was the continued decline in the ability, and willingness, of local media to provide serious coverage of breaking news. The Ventura County Star covered the story aggressively. (And still is.) The Los Angeles Times did a good job too. Here in Santa Barbara, the News-Press is currently at war with its editors (25 so far have resigned) and its Day Fire coverage consisted mostly of Associated Press stories.
TV stations confine most live news coverage to news slots, and coverage — though often vivid — is short on useful details (yet long on advertising and network show promos disguised as news).
There's only one regional news radio station with enough staff to assign reporters to the fire. That's KNX/1070 in Los Angeles. The station had some Day Fire coverage, but it was usually buried amidst coverage of other stuff happening in the country's largest radio market. Ventura's KVTA/1520 did the best it could with minimal staffing. In Santa Barbara, KZSB/1290 is a news station in name only, carrying BBC feeds and audio capsules of stale news from the morning paper, which is written yesterday.
As for websites, KNX's is the best of a busy breed. The current trend for media outlets is to garbage up their websites with a zillion links and dozens of graphics and animations. Not to mention popup windows and other annoyances. Newspapers, which might have the most useful and deep information, like to put readers through registration gauntlets or to bury "content" behind paywalls. The Santa Barbara News-Press even puts its current daily news behinds a paywall. I'm a long-time subscriber and I've long since given up on making my online subscription work. It's hard to imagine a more reader-hostile website.
For news on demand, everybody — including nearly all news organizations large and small — looked (and linked) to one source: InciWeb, an "Incident Information System" that aggregates a variety of official sources. These include the U.S. Forest Service (Inciweb's umbrella organization), the National Park Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Aircraft Services, the U.S. Fire Administration, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management. Among others. Its About page explains,
The system was developed with two primary missions: The first was to provide a standardized reporting tool for the Public Affairs community during the course of wildland fire incidents. The second was to provide the public a single source of information related to active wildland fire information.
A number of supporting systems automate the delivery of incident information to remote sources. This ensures that the information on active wildland fire is consistent, and the delivery is timely.
Currently InciWeb is being tested within the U.S. Forest Service, and will be used nationally in 2007 Fire Season.
I won't criticize InciWeb. It's an important and essential effort. In many ways it does a great job for a service that's both under development and under stress. It even has RSS feeds.
But it's also important to note that InciWeb failed last week, when the fire was spreading fastest and containment was at 15%. The site went down on Monday and didn't come up until late Thursday evening. And it had already been slow long before Monday's crash.
So Live Web coverage was left mostly up to citizen journalists putting up blog posts and photo streams on the likes of Flickr. If you wanted close-to-live news on the Web about the Day Fire last week, your main sources were the Ojai Post, Robert Peake, OjaiBlog, Bakersfield Californian, Flickr shots tagged 'dayfire', Technorati searches for blogs tagged 'dayfire', Libertatia Lab Reports, Sounding Circle, MaryLu Wehmeier and others, including by own blog. (My own favorite pictures of the fire came from Drumwhistles. The most revealing may have been the ones I took while flying over the fires at dawn on September 18.)
So, on September 25th, while the Day Fire was pushing a mushroom cloud of smoke and ash up into the stratosphere, I wrote, With InciWeb down and the mainstream media covering everything else, we need to collect Southern Californians who are paying steady attention (to the fire), and added, I'm going to work on some kind of River of News thing to aggregate and flow Day Fire news from citizen journals to the world. Doesn't mean I'm going to succeed. (I'm no techie, really.) But I'm going to try. Or stop when somebody else beats me to it, and point to that.
Here's how Dave Winer, who came up with the River of News concept, describes it:
Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up. To me, this more approximates the way I read a print newspaper, actually it's the way I wish I could read a print newspaper -- instead of having to go to the stories, they come to me. This makes it easier for me to use my brain's powerful scanning mechanism. It's faster, I can subscribe to more, and my fingers do less work.
Dave invented the first River of News style aggregator in 1999, and wrote the above in early 2005. Then on August 22 of this year, Dave found a perfect home for the concept: Blackberries, Treos and other hand-helds that can browse the Web but are all but useless for viewing complex, graphics-heavy websites — which happen to compose approximately 100% of the mainstream news outlets. And a lot of blogs, too. With nytimesriver and bbcriver, Dave showed River of News delivery was ideal for the media devices almost every adult carries in their pockets.
What I wanted for the Day Fire wasn't news from just one source (such as any one newspaper, broadcast station or blog). I wanted all news about the fire from anybody who had anything to say or show — specifically, anybody writing "Day Fire" or using the "dayfire" tag in text or with a photograph.
The next day, David Sifry stepped up and made that happen, with the Day Fire News River. It aggregates feeds of keyword searches for "Day Fire" and tag searches for "dayfire", while also listing a variety of official sources, such as Inciweb.
For my part I created a temporary character called "FireHose", who started a blog with a list of "favorites" that could add a stream of posts to the Day Fire news river. While putting that together, I began to think that "hose" should be a species of "river" that comes into existence for the single purpose of aggregating topic searches about specific incidents: a fire, a hurricane, a flood, a snowstorm, a terrorist attack, whatever. As sites, Hoses of News would persist for archival purposes (no need to take them down), but their purposes would be as temporary as the incidents they address.
Now here's the key. It should be easy to create a news hose. So easy, in fact, that any citizen (as well as any official with, say, a fire department) can make one. How do we create that ease?
I think we need companies close to (or in) the blogging business to create easy-to-make emergency Hose of News systems: the online equivalent of those "In case of fire, break glass" things they have in the hallways of schools and hospitals. It wouldn't take much.
Scoop Nisker says, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own". Substitute "software" for "news" and you get my point.
__________________________Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal
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New system
On August 24th, 2007 gifts (not verified) says:
Where I am, we have been having the weather warning tests every month. For the last 6 months, every one of them have been interrupted with static. We have complained and sent off emails and calls to the people in charge. We just get calls saying that they have not seen anything wrong with the system so we must be mistaken. And yet, every time, still the same problem. There needs to be a lot of changes made to help protect the public. There could be some bad things that come out of this. With the strange weather that we have been having the past couple of years, can we really afford for the system to come crashing down around us? It could lead to the deaths of many people that could be saved if we only could revamp the system.
Umm. It's already been done. Just not popular.
On October 14th, 2006 Taran (not verified) says:
You're just not on board yet. The SMS systems have been used with mobile phones in the earthquake after Indonesia, not too different from the Alert Retrieval Cache (2 months before we met in person, Doc). Asterisk server, negotiated interconnections.
Groups of us have shouted and screamed about this at for some time, but now that you've said it, hey. In retrospect, I probably should have wandered around and told people "Benjamin Franklin said to use SMS in combination with HAM to centalize news and so on and so forth".
That's really what you need to focus on - mobile interconnections. You see, only 2 things really work in those sorts of things, Doc. HAM Radio and SMS on mobile phones are the lowest common denominators.
After the earthquake in Indonesia, guess what was used? Ahh. But you didn't hear about that, more than likely.
The key factors related to this are:
(1) Ownership: everyone wants to own the network (on many different levels).
(2) It-Wasn't-Invented-Here/It-Was-Invented-Here (depending on where you live), with a side order of "oops, it happened?"
To make it easier, I drew a picture back in 2004. Maybe you'll find it useful.
The link would probably be useful.
On October 14th, 2006 Taran (not verified) says:
http://static.flickr.com/26/38436633_144b0ff675_o.png
News hackers?
On October 9th, 2006 cprise (not verified) says:
The term may sound uncharitable, but that's what sites like Indymedia and Wikinews were made for. Perhaps getting their attention and making suggestions for improvement would be the best thing to do.
Software hacking works because you can always start out on a given project/subject by goofing around, and only have to be more responsible in your updates as interest in the project grows. News won't work like that exactly, as the quality has to be good from the get-go.
I still think the best example of doing responsive and impartial news in the public interest is to assemble teams of professionals for coverage at various levels (local, regional, etc.) and fund them through a flat viewer license-fee as is done in the UK with the BBC. Theoretically this is what PBS & NPR were supposed to accomplish in the US, and I think Americans should start looking for reasons why that failed: Hearing about it 8-20 months later on Frontline is not news, and the local stations do *zip* for in-depth reporting. The model of charity+commercials+state control seems to have kept USA public broadcasting underfunded, and under the thumb of politicians and the well-heeled. How is it that the BBC needs neither charity, nor state funds, nor commercial sponsors and yet does 10x the job that PBS/NPR does (indeed, with the later relying on the former for almost all of their international coverage)?
Our first lesson from our media fiasco should be that the funding model of an organization determines its biases and efficacy. With the likes of both IndyMedia and Fox, the public gets what we pay for. Think about that.
Inciweb limitations
On October 7th, 2006 Tom Kempton (not verified) says:
I think that inciweb has made getting information about fires easier but perhaps less accurate. The info that goes out on inciweb is sometimes as much as 24 hours old. Unless the info officers are taking special effort to update it more often it get dated quickly by a quick running fire.
I have been looking for a way to get info out quicker but to also include the very compelling video and digital stills that seem to be available from so many sources at fires these days. The helo crews, law enforcement, everyone has a camera. Making sure that the images get credited correctly and are accurate is a challenge but a picture is truley worth a thousand words. I will look into what you are talking about with river of news and see if I can adapt some of that.
I know that the media is increasingly just using the inciweb to base their stories on and they are using it instead of actually getting out to the fire and interviewing incident personnel. The challenge for info officers will be to become field correspondants and actually create the news stories that keep the public informed. What is typically a problem at these fires is the limited bandwidth available. often it is just a fax line and a phone. Having a flyaway satellite uplink and unlimited transponder time to send out info would be great but not very realistic. I look forward to seeing more about remote reporting and how the technology can be adapted.
"River of News"
On October 7th, 2006 Chuck McGuire (not verified) says:
One reason that there are only limited sources of information coming out of incidents like the Day fire is that no one really knows in real time what is happening. I have been involved with even larger fires as a fire fighter up through command and the "fog of war" is what you are operating in. A report from here contradicts a report from there, and it takes time to figure out what is really going on. If you live in the forest like I do, you have three options. Prepare to evacuate at any time, prepare to make a stand, or do nothing and let the fire run over you.
Chuck
ex-volunteer firefighter and now a 9-1-1 dispatcher.