The strength of a newspaper lies in its ability to provide in-depth, local information to its readership. The challenge when dealing with breaking stories has been how to quickly disseminate information on a rapidly evolving story.
At the Daily Gate City, a 5-day, PM newspaper located in Keokuk, Iowa, along the Mississippi River, we were able to marshal the strength of our newspaper with the nimbleness of our Web site – dailygate.com – to provide the best news coverage to our readers.
In mid-June, flooding in northern Iowa was causing concern for many towns in southern Iowa, including Keokuk. For the first few days, it appeared that Keokuk and neighboring Illinois and Missouri would experience high water, but nothing that would compare to the Flood of 1993.
But as the rains continued and the flooding became catastrophic upstream, the river level – as well as the anxiety level – rose in Keokuk. Within days, the river level went from a prediction of a near-record flood level to a more-than-record level flood. The predictions changed hourly, as did plans for how to deal with the floods.
We print our paper in the late morning, but it is delivered to our readers in the mid-afternoon or late afternoon. To provide timely and useful information, we decided that we would have to take a new approach to our printed product and our Web product. We have a small staff, and under normal circumstances, we put the majority of our efforts into the newspaper, and our TownNews.com designed and supported site can be updated quickly and efficiently.
But because of the unique circumstances surrounding the flood, we knew we would have to place more emphasis on our Web site. During the flood, we posted frequent, sometimes hourly, updates to stories that ran in the paper. At times, we wrote stories that would only be used on the Web – because those stories would be outdated by the next print schedule. We increased the number of stories that we lifted from the newspaper and placed on the Web. And our TownNews.com site was able to do this effortlessly.
Also, TownNews.com helped make changes to our Web site template in a very timely manner. We sell an e-Edition of the newspaper, which offers readers a PDF version of the entire print product. But during the flood, delivering our newspaper to some area residents was impossible. To ensure all of our readers would receive the complete product, we removed the registration requirements for the e-Edition, giving access to everyone who could get on the Web.
We also added more photos to the site, and TownNews.com was able to make the changes to our site that made this possible. And since we were using the site in ways we never had before, we wanted other changes made to the Web site, and the staff at TownNews.com accommodated our needs without hesitation.
In normal circumstances, we are able to update our Web site with little hassle, and we believe that it is a useful, informative site.
In these unusual circumstances, we were able to improve the usefulness and the timeliness of our Web site, while not becoming overwhelmed by the time it takes to manage it. We spent our time on providing good content, not on managing Web code.
And our efforts paid off. The number of unique visitors to our Web site more than doubled during the times of greatest anxiety. And we received several phone calls from readers saying that our Web site provided the most accurate, most timely information on the flood for our area.
In the end, several levee breaks in other areas kept the river level from setting a new record in Keokuk – but just barely. But the flood was still a huge story for Keokuk and the area, and our Web site helped us do a better job of meeting our mission: to keep the residents of Keokuk and the area informed in a timely and comprehensive way.
(Mark Smidt is the publisher at Daily Gate City in Keokuk, Iowa.)
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