Can I get myself into a pattern of regular blogging? Not sure, but will try.
I do enjoy, in its own way, wildfire season. Many people turn to our Website for the latest fire news, and I’ve been doing this long enough I know just what to ask and how to assemble it, fast.
One tricky thing is when a fire gets big enough that the local firefighters and Central Oregon Interagency Dispatch hand off to an incident management team. They do a great job, but the transition can be … messy.
I love what InciWeb brings to the table, for the bigger fires – a uniform presentation, and the ability to get photos, maps etc. I don’t think the government has thrown enough servers at it – it’s awfully slow most of the time – and I get to hear how the Forest Service, etc. folks wrestle with trying to make it work. (Heck, most in govt. aren’t allowed to access Facebook/Twitter, for fear of them wasting time yakking with friends. Those are getting to be crucial info platforms, folks – you really should find ways to make sure they can use it – for work, of course – but why not for other things during breaks?)
Anyway, I digress, as usual. We have a new group of ‘KTVZ freshmen’ (and women) you might say, learning the ropes. Today, Joe Burns got his first taste of reporting from the fire lines. He was nervous – who could blame him? – but I’m sure he did fine.
When the Rooster Rock Fire blew up near Plainview, we got TONS of great photos from amateurs and a few pros, and assembled a wonderful, ever-growing slide show. These fires now are in more remote areas, but still have caused damage. Hopefully not much more of that.
As a reporter, you get to know the people you deal with quite frequently, like the folks at Prineville fire dispatch. They help us out a lot, and I try to do the same, when I spot info they might not have, or some conflicting info, or holes in a news release (like I do withour local police agencies – hey, their main job is to catch bad guys and gals, not to write news releases!).
But the shorthand sometimes comes at a cost of less-than-totally-accurate writing. For example, if we say “24 thousand acres are burning on the Warm Springs Reservation,” it’s not really true. If a fire or group of fires reaches such a size, it usually means far less than that acreage burning at any one time. Add in the fact that it often will include unburned islands within the perimter – and land set ablaze by firefighters in burnouts, to rob the fire of fuel – and it’s as imprecise as anything that’s fast-changing and dealt with by fallible humans as best they can.
But the extra eyeballs that come to our Website – I hope we reward them with the best, most accurate roundup of info we have, as updated as can be, day or night. Makes for long hours, but also helps build a reputation that we’re the place to turn to learn the latest. And that can stand us in good stead when the news turns to ice on the roads, instead of fires in the canyons. After all, to get a lot of page views in summer, when smart, sane folks spend time away from their computers, is very satisfying – because when the chill returns (it’s 59 out now!), they’ll come back and hang out, we hope.
Speaking of hanging out, the embryonic High Desert Forum is still in soft-opening test mode. Hope you give it a try, as a place to talk that’s more focused than the scattershot message threads on articles that rise and fall, come and go off the home page. It’s likely to change more in coming days, weeks and months as we seek out the right answer for such a need. Hopefully you’ll take the ride along with us, as we try to create a conversation spot – an online coffee shop/pub, if you will – that complements the Facebooks, Twitters, etc. I very much hope to keep the emphasis on the positive there – talking about great places, people, groups, companies etc. – and of course, the political debates/arguments too. The same rules as the Website will apply, with more tools to thumbs-up the great discussions and … we’ll see how it goes.
Leave it to Barney 