The Best New Media Coverage of Hurricane Sandy

Yesterday and today reporters and anchors covered Hurricane Sandy thoroughly and sometimes dangerously.  My family switched between three different stations where anchors sat at that desk for hours, while reporters stood by the waves and caught officials and clean up crews to interview– a feat in off-the-cuff presentation, persistence, and commitment.

On a digital level, the sweeping hurricane damage generated some of the best “live” online coverage .  While there was not the same kind of digital force in the days of Katrina or Bob, Hurricane Sandy drove out some of the fastest developed new media.  Here are some important ones:

Happening Now: The Huffington Post

Live coverage to replace the NY Studio airs 10pm to 10 am.  Topics include general coverage, political implications.

• Live Video Chat
• Social Media Ticker
• Interactive View Guide and Alerts for upcoming programing

NSTAR’s Interactive Outage Map 

Massachusetts got a real time outage map to play with if their computers stayed on last night.  The Map shows how many customers lost power and were serviced.  There were some reports that not all the electricity had gone out in the regions highlighted.

The BBC Photo and Video Interactive of Manhattan

The BBC’s interactive is extremely thorough with pictures around the edges  that coincide with a large map of Manhattan.  Click on the pictures marked “clickable” and you can see photo galleries or video coverage of that particular section of damage.  Highlight: the citizen journalism shooting the explosions of the power plants that devastated the city’s electricity well into today and probably tomorrow.

The New York Times’ User Generated Pictures

The picture gallery set up like a literal wall of photographs is powerful in that it highlights the huge number of people affected.  Its submit form is simple and includes a google map to point out people’s direct location.

Time Magazine’s Instagram Feed

Time magazine collected and posted pictures of hurricane damage.  The submit form online or with the hashtag #timemagazine made sharing people’s struggles and damage to their two-hundred thousand followers easy.

Yahoo’s All-in-One Live Blog Ticker

Yahoo created a ticker of sorts of:

• Tweets
• Facebook Comments
• Articles
• AP Photographs
• Call to action: What can you do

The function was a good way to hear voices but my only critique is that it wasn’t very visual at all.  Lots of text from the Facebook comments and the pictures weren’t highlighted enough I’d say.  Maybe if the text were in a different font it would be easier to read because some of the comments are definitely worthy of highlighting.

The Worst:

The New York Times Interactive

A stationary camera from the 51st floor of the NYTimes building changes every minute. The real time coverage would be cool if that need wasn’t being met by the live video coverage by every news channel and their own stationary camera pointing at the storm.

Fake #Sandy Updates 

BuzzFeedBen pointed out that there was a Twitter handle tweeting fake updates of New York Outages.  So that’s, you know… crazy…