1. #wafloods is a revolution in Washington media. The more we can create cross news room standards like this, the better.
2. Lewis County Buzz is back for the floods as well. Originally started in response to the 2007 floods, the Chronicle shuttered the forums after things got out of hand back in August. It might have been the nature of online forums, but I’m sure a little moderating (whether imposed by the Chronicle or by the community) would have done some good.
Lets hope that they either keep the forums open this time, or a user has the foresight to start a new forum in the expectations that the Chronicle will close the Buzz in a little while anyway.
3. The Olympian turned their site blog into a breaking news blog. Nice touch for the floods.
These are good innovations but they are still nonetheless within the fold of an industry with a broken economic model. It is not inconceivable at this point to see the demise of many major media outlets, locally, regionally and nationally, i.e. Olympian, Seattle Times, New York Times to name just a few. The internet is simply a delivery mechanism and blogs, with a very few exceptions, are not “news.” Where will people get their news? The time for radical innovation is now but making “it” work financially is as yet a seemingly impossible obstacle.
Wouldn’t it be incredible to make it happen in Olympia, though?
As I said earlier on Olyblog, I’ve been really impressed with the DOT’s response to all this storm stuff. I’d actually say that they gave the #wafloods folks a precedent in terms of hash tags: IIRC they started the #seatst (Seattle Twitter Storm Team) hash tag back during the snow, and it just keeps going from there! It’ll be interesting to see how it goes from now on….